Ruby and the Interpreter Pattern

Hi, today's entry is going to talk about an article written by our professor Ariel Ortiz. The article/paper is titled “Language Design and Implementation using Ruby and the Interpreter Pattern “. After reading this paper, I realized some things. First of all, I got really impressed that this paper explains a framework used to teach in a course, in my actual university, that I already took. Second, in the title the Interpreter Pattern is mentioned and actually in another course (from which I also write a blog weekly) we are treating design patterns. It’s important to mention that I’m taking that course now and it is with the same professor.
 Basically, The S-expression Interpreter Framework (SIF) is explained in this article as a tool for teaching language design and implementation concepts. This interpreter was written in Ruby to help us, the students, to learn a popular object-oriented dynamic language and language design and implementations concepts. But here is the curious point, I don’t remember seeing this interpreter in that course, instead of that we wrote a metacircular evaluator in Clojure. I suppose because Clojure started to grow in the past years, but I would have liked to take a look into this interpreter while I was taking that course. Why? First because it includes the interpreter pattern, and I think it can help me in my other course (Software Design and Architecture in which we are also using Ruby) and also because our professor stays in his paper that SIF can be easily extended, so I started thinking: will I be able to perform that activity?
In general, I got surprised of how this course has been taught for more than 15 years at my university, and also how a course can change through the years depending on the field modifications and the moment tendencies when it is imparted.

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