Sometimes strange things happen. I’ve been developing a small, basic recursive descent parser for Ruby called RDParse. Just before writing this post I decided to Google that name, and lo and behold the first result is a Ruby recursive descent parser called RDParse, created by Dennis Ranke, that I posted to Code Snippets for posterity several months ago. Since both of these libraries are unlikely to be used at once and that Dennis doesn’t seem to be maintaining his version, I’ve decided to stick with RDParse as the name of mine for now.

You can download my RDParse as rdparse.rb.txt, just rename it at your end if you want to use it. Read More

I’m creating a library that sorely needs a ‘debug mode’ where each step of what the library does is printed to the screen for developers to check out. I wanted the debug mode to be easy to set and for the debug messages to be as non-intrusive as possible. Initially I arranged it in such a fashion:

class MyLibrary
def initialize(options = {})
# Set @debug here if necessary
end

def debug_message(msg)
return false unless @debug
# Print debug message in certain way here
end

def do_something
# Do stuff here and in other methods
debug_message “Such and such message”
# Do more stuff
end
end

Each debug message was a simple method call to a routine that only printed the message if debug mode was activated. Read More