May 2009 Meeting
The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 18th of May, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. As usual our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space at their offices. The room is currently at capacity, but if you register with them they'll put you on a waiting list.
Agenda
Ruby FFI
Sean O'Halpin will be talking about Ruby FFI, probably using his FFI-ncurses gem to provide some examples.
Treetop
Roland Swingler has been looking at Treetop:
Regular expressions are great but they're unreadable when complex, and there are some things they just can't do. The alternative is to build a language parser - but that's really hard, isn't it? In this talk, I'll try and dispell that idea and show how building little languages in ruby is really simple. I'll show two examples: defining a mini-language from scratch to build XMPP bots, and using it as part of your screen-scraping toolbox.
Scheme
James Coglan is writing a Scheme interpreter in Ruby:
Scheme is a member of the Lisp family of languages, and is an excellent place to start if you're interested in writing your own language. It's small and simple to parse, yet has several advanced features that are only now becoming mainstream. Based on Heist, my main interpreter project, I present a brief overview of Scheme and use Treetop to create a small runtime that includes booleans, integer arithmetic, variables, user-defined functions, conditionals, recursion and lexical closures.
Pub
It's tradition at LRUG to head to the local pub after the talks to relax and chat with other rubyists. We go to The Crown Tavern which is a short walk from either of the venues Skills Matter provides. If you can't make the main meeting you'll find plenty of rubyists propping up the bar from about 8:00pm onwards after the talks. Come along!
Registration
Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come (or even just thinking about it). Please register as early as you can. In fact, go and do it now! The reason for this is that if a lot of folk want to come we obviously need a larger room and Skills Matter need about a week's notice to book it. They'll only do so if the registrations dictate it. If you register late they might not have enough time to book a larger room and you might get put on a waiting list or simply turned away. We don't want that!
There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.
Posted by Murray Steele on May 05, 2009