Ruby and the Interpreter Pattern

On this entry we are going to talk about an article wrote by our professor Ariel Ortiz, which for me seems to be very interesting, so here we go. The main idea of this article is talk about a framework called S-expression Interpreter Framework (SIF), because is a tool that the author have been working with the alumni of the Tecnológico de Monterrey specially in the programming language course. Before we continue, it is important to know that this framework is written in Ruby, but what is Ruby?
Ruby is an interpreted, dynamically typed programming language, that helps simplifying the construction on languages interpreters, more specific it has the advantages of having garbage collection, open classes, first class continuations, built-in regular expressions and hashes.
About the source language notation used was the S-expression (symbolic expression) mentioned before, is a notation mainly used in Lisp and the advantages of this notation are that code and data can be easily represented, minimal elements, no associativity problem. On my experience using this notation is that at the begging is hard because of the parenthesis, but once you get it, you notice that it is less code than in other languages. In the other hand, the interpreter pattern helps to evaluate a language grammar or expression.
These three S-expression, Ruby and Interpreter Patter for their use, the article give us a detail instructions taking in count that Interpreter.eval class method is the heart of the SIF and it supports integers, symbols, lists and procedures.
In conclusion, this framework is really useful (SIF) because of the features of Ruby give us and the interpreter. Ruby at the same time, it is important to know the bases of this programming language like data types, naming conventions and code blocks. Don't forget that SIF also can be extended.