| Author | Minero Aoki, Translated by Vincent Isambart and Clifford Escobar Caoile |
| Format | online HTML |
| Price | free |
This book explores several themes with the following goals in mind: To have knowledge of the structure of ruby, To gain knowledge about language processing systems in general, To acquire skills in reading source code.
Ruby is an object-oriented language developed by Yukihiro Matsumoto. The official implementation of the Ruby language is called ruby. It is actively developed and maintained by the open source community. Our first goal is to understand the inner-workings of the ruby implementation. This book is going to investigate ruby as a whole.
Secondly, by knowing about the implementation of Ruby, we will be able to know about other language processing systems. This book tries to cover all topics necessary for implementing a language, such as hash table, scanner and parser, evaluation procedure, and many others. Because this book is not intended as a text book, going through entire areas and ideas without any lack was not reasonable. However the parts relating to the essential structures of a language implementation are adequately explained. And a brief summary of Ruby language itself is also included so that readers who don’t know about Ruby can read this book.
Chapters include:
- A Minimal Introduction to Ruby
- Objects
- Names and name tables
- Classes and modules
- Garbage collection
- Variables and constants
- Security
- Ruby Language Details
- yacc crash course
- Parser
- Finite-state scanner
- Syntax tree construction
- Structure of the evaluator
- Context
- Methods
- Blocks
- Dynamic evaluation
- Loading
- Threads
