Abstract
Ruby is a dynamic, object-oriented language with advanced features such as yield operator and dynamic class manipulation. They make Ruby a popular, highly productive scripting language, but they also make the semantics of Ruby complicated and difficult to understand. Even the JIS/ISO standard of Ruby seems to contain some ambiguities. For Ruby to be established as a reliable scripting language, it should have a rigorous semantics. To meet this challenge, we present a formal operational semantics that can serve as a high-level specification for both the users and implementers. The key insight underlying the semantics is that various elaborate features of Ruby can be cleanly represented as a composition of two orthogonal calculi: one for objects and classes and the other for representing control. The presented semantics leads straightforwardly to a reference implementation. Initial evaluation of our implementation confirms that the presented semantics conforms to commonly accepted Ruby behavior.
The first author has been partially supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 24700021. The first and fourth author has been partially supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 25280019.
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Ueno, K., Fukasawa, Y., Morihata, A., Ohori, A. (2014). The Essence of Ruby. In: Garrigue, J. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. APLAS 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8858. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12736-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12736-1_5
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