4 ms·

Fancy: first bootstrapped language targeting Rubinius VM other than Ruby

58 points by tianyicui 16y ago

drivebyacct2 16y ago
Is it petty of me that the unmatched single quotes drive me insane?
- bakkdoor 16y ago
  You mean symbol literals? Ruby uses :foo but that would mix up with the keyword message syntax. So I took Lisp's syntax: 'foo =) Also, since you'll want to have syntax for message names as well, they need to be able to have colons in them, e.g. 'foo:bar:. Basically anything non-whitespace starting with a "'" is taken as a symbol literal.
- rst 16y ago
  Perhaps not --- but avoid exposure to Lisp. (Unmatched single quotes are the easiest way to embed literal S-expression data inside Lisp S-expressions representing code.)
  - thefool 16y ago
    And ocaml, where you need them for polymorphism.
    - riffraff 16y ago
      and scala, where they also represent symbols
- stopmi 16y ago
  think of them as apostrophes
- omaranto 16y ago
  It's always bugged me that many programming languages instead of using matching opening and closing quotes surround strings in pairs of closing quotes! )I guess most fonts that programmer's use render these as a sort of neutral vertical quote, so that strings don't look so silly.)
  - quag 16y ago
    Ascii (and keyboards) only have a single key for ' and ". They are used as both apostrophes, and quotation marks. Typing in code using proper opening and closing quotation marks would be tedious. Editors could choose to apply some smarts and display strings wrapped in quotes using "curly quotes", but that complicates copy-and-paste and so on. Given the entry situation, the only sane thing to do is use a font that makes both ' and " vertical bars.
SingAlong 16y ago
Nice. It looks like the syntax is inspired by Javascript and Ruby. A previous blog post on the Rubinius blog mentioned that they'll be talking about a Language Toolkit sometime soon.
- swaits 16y ago
  Or Smalltalk maybe?
bakkdoor 16y ago
Btw, here's a list of current features I forgot to link to in the post: https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy/blob/master/doc/features.md https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy/blob/master/doc/features.m...
- pdelgallego 16y ago
  I have this little scheme that I am writing (just for the sake of it), It would be great if you can write some blog about how to generate Rubinius bytecode. So far I have been compiling to C, but I just created a horrible mess.
  - bakkdoor 16y ago
    Yeah, I'll probably write up some of the stuff I've been doing with Fancy soon.
railsjedi 16y ago
Rubini.us is looking like it's starting to gain a really solid community behind it. I'm looking forward to switching to it in the near future (probably if/when Heroku starts supporting it) This article is making me wish could make CoffeeScript run within the Rubinius VM, and have access to the same objects and libraries of my Rails app. Wish I had time to build that. Maybe someone smarter than me with some free cycles could take this project on :-)
ejdyksen 16y ago
I think the more accurate term is self-hosting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hosting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hosting
- tianyicui 16y ago
  Bootstrapping is accurate and used in many compiler related texts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers)
itsnotvalid 16y ago
I am seeing more people trying Rubinus VM to build languages / port languages: see https://github.com/vito/quanto https://github.com/vito/quanto for example.

58 points by tianyicui 16y ago

drivebyacct2 16y ago

Is it petty of me that the unmatched single quotes drive me insane?

bakkdoor 16y ago
You mean symbol literals? Ruby uses :foo but that would mix up with the keyword message syntax. So I took Lisp's syntax: 'foo =) Also, since you'll want to have syntax for message names as well, they need to be able to have colons in them, e.g. 'foo:bar:. Basically anything non-whitespace starting with a "'" is taken as a symbol literal.
rst 16y ago
Perhaps not --- but avoid exposure to Lisp. (Unmatched single quotes are the easiest way to embed literal S-expression data inside Lisp S-expressions representing code.)
- thefool 16y ago
  And ocaml, where you need them for polymorphism.
  - riffraff 16y ago
    and scala, where they also represent symbols
stopmi 16y ago
think of them as apostrophes
omaranto 16y ago
It's always bugged me that many programming languages instead of using matching opening and closing quotes surround strings in pairs of closing quotes! )I guess most fonts that programmer's use render these as a sort of neutral vertical quote, so that strings don't look so silly.)
- quag 16y ago
  Ascii (and keyboards) only have a single key for ' and ". They are used as both apostrophes, and quotation marks. Typing in code using proper opening and closing quotation marks would be tedious. Editors could choose to apply some smarts and display strings wrapped in quotes using "curly quotes", but that complicates copy-and-paste and so on. Given the entry situation, the only sane thing to do is use a font that makes both ' and " vertical bars.

SingAlong 16y ago

Nice. It looks like the syntax is inspired by Javascript and Ruby. A previous blog post on the Rubinius blog mentioned that they'll be talking about a Language Toolkit sometime soon.

swaits 16y ago
Or Smalltalk maybe?

bakkdoor 16y ago

Btw, here's a list of current features I forgot to link to in the post: https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy/blob/master/doc/features.md https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy/blob/master/doc/features.m...

pdelgallego 16y ago
I have this little scheme that I am writing (just for the sake of it), It would be great if you can write some blog about how to generate Rubinius bytecode. So far I have been compiling to C, but I just created a horrible mess.
- bakkdoor 16y ago
  Yeah, I'll probably write up some of the stuff I've been doing with Fancy soon.

railsjedi 16y ago

Rubini.us is looking like it's starting to gain a really solid community behind it. I'm looking forward to switching to it in the near future (probably if/when Heroku starts supporting it) This article is making me wish could make CoffeeScript run within the Rubinius VM, and have access to the same objects and libraries of my Rails app. Wish I had time to build that. Maybe someone smarter than me with some free cycles could take this project on :-)

ejdyksen 16y ago

I think the more accurate term is self-hosting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hosting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hosting

tianyicui 16y ago
Bootstrapping is accurate and used in many compiler related texts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers)

itsnotvalid 16y ago

I am seeing more people trying Rubinus VM to build languages / port languages: see https://github.com/vito/quanto https://github.com/vito/quanto for example.