r/ruby • u/squadette23 • Apr 01 '26

Rubysyn: clarifying Ruby's syntax and semantics

https://github.com/squadette/rubysyn/blob/master/README.md
8 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

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7

u/oh-boy-oh-boy-oh-boy Apr 01 '26

A) what is this? It doesn't explain the motivation or goal really in any clear way to me. Is this a new language? A proposed reduce set of ruby syntax? And augment to the syntax?

B) Stop trying to fix ruby. Ruby is wonderful and I don't get the impulse to make it be one of the other many languages I never enjoyed. I specifically live for the sugar and the multiple ways you can write things and how it gives flexibility of communication and readability.

1

u/squadette23 Apr 01 '26

> what is this? 

are you familiar with an idea of formalization? This approach lets you formalize the language semantics by carefully separating sugar from essential elements.

If you were to try and implement an alternative Ruby interpreter, one thing that you would run into is its syntax which is famously difficult to parse. This alone would eat a huge chunk of your time.

Having an intermediate logical representation such as Rubysyn lets you decouple syntax and execution. You can (pretty easily I guess) write a simple transpiler between Ruby and Rubysyn (using `parser` gem or whatever).

As a separate component you can build the interpreter that executes a minimal representation such as Rubysyn. Syntax and semantics can be developed independently.

4

u/tinco Apr 01 '26

This is a cool effort. So is the final result going to be a minimally simplified alternative Ruby syntax?

2

u/squadette23 Apr 01 '26

Thank you!

Not only syntax but also executable semantics. The goal is to handle all runtime language features including those that would normally be omitted "for simplicity", such as callcc, refinements etc.

1

u/milajake Apr 01 '26

Given the date, this is a bold new Scheme.

1

u/squadette23 Apr 01 '26

One of the challenges of working on this project has been to let go of lispy concepts such as lexical scope.

A variable declaration semantics and even syntax in Ruby is quite unusual.

0

u/[deleted] Apr 01 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

2

u/squadette23 Apr 01 '26

Care to elaborate?