A 1-to-1 conversion of JLox to Ruby.
For the original code see https://github.com/munificent/craftinginterpreters
Lox is a great stepping stone for writing an interpreter for non-lisp-languages. Before this one, there were no Ruby-implementations and I felt like one was needed. https://github.com/munificent/craftinginterpreters/wiki/Lox-implementations
With this conversion I tried to stick closely to the Java sources so that beginners can easily read and understand both.
Sometimes I decided to use a different functionality or a shortcut to achieve the same goal. For those cases I added a lot of documentation including links to https://ruby-doc.org/ and relevant questions on stackoverflow.
The coding style is not always consistent because I am working on this code at differing times and without touching files that I am done with again.
But why am I just converting the Java-code instead of following the tutorial?
The answer: I did follow the the tutorial, but the code is lost because I
didn't bother creating a git-repo. (Don't be like that, ok?)
Go to the main directory, open your command line and run
ruby rblox.rb Run prompt.
ruby rblox.rb <file> Run a single lox file and quit.
ruby rblox.rb <directory> Run all lox files in a directory.
With the -repl (or -interactive) option, the prompt is started after executing the normal file or directory:
ruby rblox.rb -repl <file> Run a single lox file and run prompt.
ruby rblox.rb -repl <directory> Run all lox files in a directory and run prompt.
Use the -test option to print which file is currently being run.
ruby rblox.rb -test <directory> Run all lox files in a directory and run prompt.
Please contact me at any time if you have questions or suggestions.
The code works, but sometimes gives more errors than JLox. Maybe I will take care of this. I will not, however, try to tweak performance.
Yeah, SlowLox is slow. In my tests JLox was 5-14 times faster.
This gets much worse when recursion is used because Ruby is really bad at that.