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Homer: (comes out of other side of matter transporter) Hmmm!
Professor Frink: I take it from that little impressed noise that you are interested in purchasing that matter transporter, sir.
Homer: (not fond of the price, hearable in voice) Ummmmmmm... two bucks... it only transports matter... ummm... well, ah... I'll give you thirty-five cents.
Professor Frink: Sold! But I must warn you, this device carries a frighteningly high risk of catastrophic--
Homer: (annoyed) I said I'll take it!
-The Simpsons
 
"Another reader asks why I ignore FORTH, which has a respectable number of dedicated - dare I say fanatic? - devotees. Alas, I continue to agree with my mad friend: FORTH is not a higher level language at all. Instead, it's a kind of assembly language that uses the programmer as a pre-compiler."
-Jerry Pournelle

What?
 
It's an implementation of a Forth / Postscript style language in Ruby. The syntax has been slightly altered to make some things a little easier (like creating dictionaries). Otherwise it is pretty straight ahead PostScript.

Why?
 
I have been doing a lot of language research and I thought it was time to implement a language. Using a higher level language like Ruby allowed me to build the interpreter very quickly.

The code is in a shape that it could be used as production code but I really hope you don't. You can download the code to look at it and play with it, but I wouldn't use this as a macro extension language. I have no intention of maintaining this long run, I provide it only as educational material.

What Is Interesting About Ripley?
 
The language itself and how it is processed is not particularly interesting if you already know Forth or PostScript. However, I think there are some interesting things about how the implementation was created.

The first is the interaction between Ripley and Ruby. Ruby is truly object oriented, so every variable can be inspected to see if it supports methods. This is important because of the nature of the PostScript language. For example, executable arrays are distinguished from normal arrays in that execution of the array is postponed during evaluation. Ruby can inspect the objects to see if there is an override method attached to the array that represents an executable array.

The second is how the operands are handled. A set of scripts is used to parse the operand code to generate stubs to talk to the interpreter, as well as test code, type checking and documentation. This allows for the programmer to be able to add an operand to the system quickly with all of the support requirements automatically.

There is some reasonably elaborate automatic testing code that checks the interpreter against a set of known good outputs. If all the tests pass you can alter the interpreter code while remaining reasonbly confident that you haven't broken anything.

Who Is Ripley?
 
One of my two permanent dogs (the other dog is a foster dog). I named the implementation after her because I thought it would be nice if people were visiting and wanted to talk about the language that she would hear her name. Plus, like her the language is simple and fun to play with.

We adopted her from the Peninsula Humane Society. If you want to adopt a nice dog that needs a good home I would recommend the Ohlone Humane Society mainly because my wife and I volunteer for them.

About Us
 
Jack Herrington, Project Lead: Full time programmer now working for Macromedia. Other sites from Jack:


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