radial and flon

to Ruby

I'm currently reworking flon in Ruby. I might use it for a customer, hence this preparatory work. I did a first pass at flor but I noticed that I was copying too much.

This effort towards Ruby is interesting. I had a need for a parsing tool so I ported flon's aabro to Ruby as raabro and since I also needed it client-side, I ported it again to Javascript as jaabro.

My old rufus-mnemo became flon's mnemo. For this Ruby port, I didn't re-use rufus-mnemo but ported mnemo back to Ruby as munemo.

These ports aren't part of the "I was copying too much" complaint I emitted above. I had simply noticed that I was porting flon one to one to Ruby and I felt uneasy about it as it progressed.

a radial core to flon

Looking back a flon itself, I was quite happy at the libraries I had built to support it. I was telling myself: so, I'm building an interpreter, all this difficult C will be hidden behind it and life will be good. I was thinking about the fun radial language I was stashing together for flon, a language strong at JSON.

I started to wonder: what if the flon business logic was written in radial itself?

I started prototyping a core radial interpreter and I named the project flar.

This core would be a minimal, non-concurrent radial interpreter, a core for flon and flor (Ruby flon). The non-core instructions, like "concurrence", "task" and the non-core attributes like "timeout", etc would be implemented as libraries (either radial, either C or Ruby depending on the target).

By non-core, I think workflow-esque stuff. The core language would be a limited yet funny programming language.

That's the plan. I try to devote one or two hours per day to it. It feels right for now.