[LRUG] Talk offer: An interpreter written in Ruby

[Jon Leighton]

Hi all,

I used to come to LRUG a few years back, and I'm hoping to start coming
again on a regular basis.

As people are talking about talks, I have a suggestion. I'm genuinely
not sure if it will be of interest to people, so just asking for
thoughts really.

Basically, I have just finished my uni degree. In the third year you are
required to do some sort of project, which makes up a third of the
year's work. I ended up writing an interpreter, in Ruby, for a language
heavily inspired by Ruby. A sort of distilled Ruby-like language which
is far too simplistic to be useful and probably overlooks tonnes of
important things.

But anyway! The point is not really that the language is utterly
pointless. The point is that it's an interpreter written in a very
high-level language, which I think it relatively easy to understand.

So I'm offering to do a talk which would take the listener through the
workings of this interpreter. The parsing is done with Treetop, although
I wouldn't propose really talking about the parsing at all as I think a
lot of people are quite familiar with Treetop.

Here are some links if you're interested:

 * Code: http://github.com/jonleighton/carat
 * Project report: http://dump.jonathanleighton.com/project.pdf (Note
this is written very much with a view to saying the right things to
satisfy an examiner, rather than with a view to being interesting to
Ruby hackers)

I might as well finish with some buzzwords. If you ever wondered what
"trampoline function" or "continuation passing style" means then this is
your chance :)

Cheers,
Jon

-- 
http://jonathanleighton.com/