[self-interest] Re: Self in Javascript progress

David Goehrig dave at nexttolast.com
Tue Jul 12 03:44:13 UTC 2011


Yes I have, but Ometa is a horrific environment for actually defining a program in. The problem is that writing the grammar and necessary productions is harder than writing a special case parser. Additionally, I am not willing to maintain any project which would require far more code than doing it from scratch would. 

On Jul 11, 2011, at 8:37 PM, Casey Ransberger <casey.obrien.r at gmail.com> wrote:

> Have either of you looked at PetitParser or OMeta? They might make managing your grammar and semantics a bit cleaner.
> 
> 
> On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 7:30 PM, Adam <adam.spitz at gmail.com> wrote:
>  
> Awesome!
> 
> Do you have any interest in integrating this with Avocado? (http://avocadojs.com - it's a Self-like environment I've been building for JavaScript.)
> 
> I've been sticking with standard JavaScript syntax so far, but I think it'd be really cool (and maybe make me feel a bit less homesick ;) if I could write real Self code inside Self-like outliners running on top of my web browser's Self-inspired JavaScript VM.
> 
> Adam
> 
> 
> 
> --- In self-interest at yahoogroups.com, David Goehrig <dave at ...> wrote:
> >
> > As some of you may know, I've been working on implementing Self in
> > Javascript (in addition to some build system improvements), and I'd like to
> > let the list know about the progress. Today I put together a little demo of
> > what is currently working and a bit of a post on what is not:
> > 
> > http://blog.dloh.org/Self-in-Javascript-Video
> > 
> > The video is 720p so don't bother trying to watch it on your iPhone :)
> > 
> > It is not a fully functional system yet, it is about 40% of the way there,
> > and the compiler will require a rewrite before it is ready for actual use.
> > But the bones are there and for certain simple statements which invoke
> > built-in functions you can make little things happen. The way this thing
> > works currently is it parses a string into a set of tokens, and then
> > translates them into a rather LISPish variant of standard JavaScript. If
> > you look here:
> > 
> > https://github.com/cthulhuology/Self.js
> > 
> > you will see that I'm seriously abusing some little used features of the
> > JavaScript language to make it do some rather interesting backflips. In
> > effect, the entire program consists of lists of strings passed to a self
> > evaluating function object. This makes it possible to generate a rather
> > simple transformation engine which rewrites the self code into a highly
> > regular form of Javascript that is devoid of the syntatic complexity of its
> > language family.
> > 
> > The current code base is ~206 lines of JavaScript, and once you work through
> > how it works in your head, it is surprisingly legible.
> > 
> > If anyone would like to comment, contribute, or recommend some better parser
> > techniques for the full self syntax, I'd appreciate the guidance. Mostly I
> > am working through a set of test cases I extracted by looking at my own Self
> > objects and bits of the system. I'm not too concerned about being 100%
> > compliant at the moment, but simply want to trend towards completeness.
> > 
> > Dave Goehrig
> > 
> > -- 
> > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- http://blog.dloh.org/
> >
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Casey Ransberger
> 
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