Inline Graphviz

This post by David King on inline Graphviz graphs inspired me to write my first Rack middleware in a long time. David's code uses PHP on the server-end coupled with javascript to parse out Graphviz data from script tags, and then render the graphs with the appropriate Graphviz ...

Writing a (Ruby) compiler in Ruby bottom up - step 27

The Operators - Part 1: Parsing

As mentioned last time, over the previous parts I at some point brutally broke our built in operators. I did so by actually implementing proper method calls.

It also made the compiler largely unusuable, and went unnoticed because, well, the compiler is still largely unusable.

Writing a (Ruby) compiler in Ruby bottom up - step 26

I published the last article in this series in June 2010, after a long break. At the time of finally making a serious start to this part, it was April 2013, and as of the time I am editing and putting the final touches on this, it is July 2013, and ...

Writing a (Ruby) compiler in Ruby bottom up - step 25

First of all, here's the biggest reason I've been so excrutiatingly slow with getting this part together (at least that's my story, I guess I've had other things on my plate too...):

Tristan is 13 months now, and a real menace to my laptop (pulling off keys ...

Writing a (Ruby) compiler in Ruby bottom up - step 24

Apologies for the delay... This part was ready before christmas, but for various reasons I never got around to posting it. And to make matters worse I managed to post the wrong part yesterday. Sigh.

The Outer Scope

Stepping back from the attr_* debacle for a bit... I wanted to look ...

How to implement closures

This is a sort-of interlude to my regular compiler series.

The goal is to give a brief overview of some techniques for implementing closures in a programming language. I will use C for my examples, mostly because it's low level enough that a further translation to assembler etc. is ...

Writing a (Ruby) compiler in Ruby bottom up - step 23

Continuing down the rabbit hole: String

A couple of parts ago we established some of the problems with supporting even the seemingly simple attr_reader, attr_writer and attr_accessor.

Ruby gets a spec

A week or so ago, the Ruby Draft specification made the rounds

Yes... Ruby is finally getting a standard. While RubySpec has been around for a while, and is a great, it is an executable specification that tells you what, not why, and it aims to be "complete" while ...

Writing a (Ruby) compiler in Ruby bottom up - step 22

A diversion into Method missing

So far the method_missing implementation has just printed a notice and quit.

During the trip down the rabbit hole that is attr_accessor and friends that became a major annoyance.

The problem is that this notice has not included a stack backtrace or any way to ...