[racket] two languages at a time in DrRacket

This is very easy to do.

If you take a look at

http://github.com/plt/racket/blob/master/collects/datalog/lang/reader.rkt

You'll see that there is one parser and compiler for the module body
(this-read-syntax) and there is another for the REPL interactions
(parse-statement). In this case one is a subset of the other, but it
would be easy to have them be arbitrarily different.

Your module language would set up a way to communicate with the REPL,
which would use a special #%top-interaction macro to deal with it.

Jay

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 1:08 PM, Shriram Krishnamurthi <sk at cs.brown.edu> wrote:
> Surely someone here has done something like this before, and I'd like
> advice on how to do it.
>
> We're in the process of converting Margrave, our security analysis
> tool, over to Racket, and to exploit DrRacket as its user environment.
>
> What we'd like to be able to do is this: in DrRacket,
>
>  Interactions Window:
>    <a CISCO IOS firewall policy>
>
>  Click Run to "load" this policy
>
>  Definitions Window:
>    <a query in our SQL-like policy query language>
>
> That is, just as the REPL explores the values of the program in the
> definitions window, the policy query language explores the firewall
> policy in the definitions window.
>
> One analogy might be that it's like writing a Java program up top, and
> using Scheme in the REPL to explore it.  But that's only an analogy as
> far as syntax goes.  Semantically, our problem is worse (in the Java
> case, one could compile the Java into Scheme, a la ProfJ; we don't
> even have such a common intermediate language; the policy compiles to
> first-order models, and the query runs against them).
>
> Any thoughts on how to structure such an interaction?
>
> Shriram
> _________________________________________________
>  For list-related administrative tasks:
>  http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users
>



-- 
Jay McCarthy <jay at cs.byu.edu>
Assistant Professor / Brigham Young University
http://teammccarthy.org/jay

"The glory of God is Intelligence" - D&C 93