[ruby-core:90628] [Ruby trunk Feature#14844] Future of RubyVM::AST?

[samuel@oriontransfer.net]

Issue #14844 has been updated by ioquatix (Samuel Williams).


After playing around with the RC2 release, I think it's pretty good.

The only thing I'd like to see, is the use of Node instances even for cases where Array is currently used. Rather than Node.type, use explicit classes.

In addition to this rather than using Array for composite nodes (e.g. when parsing `module`), which is pretty fragile, classes specific to the node being parsed would be great, e.g. ModuleNode which has things like `#name`. Rather than an array which contains a symbol somewhere.

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Feature #14844: Future of RubyVM::AST? 
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/14844#change-75794

* Author: rmosolgo (Robert Mosolgo)
* Status: Open
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee: 
* Target version: 
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Hi! Thanks for all your great work on the Ruby language. 

I saw the new RubyVM::AST module in 2.6.0-preview2 and I quickly went to try it out. 

I'd love to have a well-documented, user-friendly way to parse and manipulate Ruby code using the Ruby standard library, so I'm pretty excited to try it out. (I've been trying to learn Ripper recently, too: https://ripper-preview.herokuapp.com/, https://rmosolgo.github.io/ripper_events/ .)

Based on my exploration, I opened a small PR on GitHub with some documentation: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/1888

I'm curious though, are there future plans for this module? For example, we might: 

- Add more details about each node (for example, we could expose the names of identifiers and operators through the node classes)
- Document each node type 

I see there is a lot more information in the C structures that we could expose, and I'm interested to help out if it's valuable. What do you think? 



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