Vernacular

Allows extending ruby's syntax and compilation process.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'vernacular'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install vernacular

Usage

At the very beginning of your script or application, require vernacular. Then, configure your list of modifiers so that vernacular knows how to modify your code before it is compiled.

For example,

Vernacular.configure do |config|
  pattern = /~n\(([\d\s+-\/*\(\)]+?)\)/
  modifier =
    Vernacular::RegexModifier.new(pattern) do |match|
      eval(match[3..-2])
    end
  config.add(modifier)
end

will extend Ruby syntax to allow ~n(...) symbols which will evaluate the interior expression as one number. This reduces the number of objects and instructions allocated for a given segment of Ruby, which can improve performance and memory.

Modifiers

Modifiers allow you to modify the source of the Ruby code before it is compiled by injecting themselves into the require chain through RubyVM::InstructionSequence::load_iseq. They can be any of the preconfigured modifiers built into Vernacular, or they can just be a plain ruby class that responds to the method modify(source) where source is a string of code. The method should returned the modified source.

RegexModifier

Regex modifiers take the same arguments as String#gsub. Either configure them with a string, as in:

Vernacular::RegexModifier.new(/~u\((.+?)\)/, 'URI.parse("\1")')

or configure them using a block, as in:

Vernacular::RegexModifier.new(pattern) do |match|
  eval(match[3..-2])
end

ASTModifier

For access to and documentation on the ASTModifier, check out the vernacular-ast gem.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/kddeisz/vernacular.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.