[racket] Use of map and eval to evaluate symbol in namespace

Hi Daniel --

Do you mean the Forth files?
I don't belienve they would make much sense to you, but it would go
something like this (as you can see, that is a FORTH definition):

: NAME S"John Doe"
   CU4
   HCTZ25 30P 1CPM
   OMZ20 30P 1CPM INSTOMZ
   SIMVA20 30P 1CPN
   L\D ;

 Expands to (NOTE: Some things are germane to our public health
system, such as renewing "continuous use" gratis medications, recipe
valid for 4 months):

John Doe

Continuous use - 4 months

Hydrochlorothiazide 25mg ---------------- 30 pills

    Take 1 pill P.O. in the morning.

Omeprazol 20mg ----------------------------- 30 pills

   Take 1 pill P.O. in the morning, 1/2 hour
   before breakfast.

Simvastatin 20mg ---------------------------- 30 pills

    Take 1 pill P.O. at night.

                    City, xx/xx/xxxx


So what´s happening here is that inside the FORTH definition,
everything delimited by ":" and ";" is a FORTH word, as they say, that
is to say, valid FORTH code.
The very cheap trick here is simply writing a file with plain text
(but called .fth, .f or other FORTH designations for filetypes)
begining with a ":", ending with a ";", and everything in between,
which are the FORTH words.
The FORTH reader than opens this file. As soon as it hits the ":", it
recognizes it's FORTH code. It's all amazingly stupid. However, what
you get is: a DSL hassle-free (no parsing/lexing), a flat-file
database for free (the name of the files), an interpreter (comes with
the territory). And code is data, data is code, in a very, very
concrete way.


Cheers,

Henry Lenzi






On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 6:29 PM, Daniel Prager
<daniel.a.prager at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Henry
>
> Racket is very suitable for writing DSLs, or even whole Ls (more advanced!).
> As you'd expect, the idioms for DSL construction in straight Racket are
> different from those in Forth and will take a bit of familiarization and
> adjustment.
>
> Would you be willing to share a more fully-fledged example of a shorthand
> medical recipe (input) and reconstructed recipe (output) so that the Racket
> Community can better understand what sounds like a very worthwhile project?
>
>
> Dan
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 6:21 AM, Henry Lenzi <henry.lenzi at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Of course, the ultimate purpose would be to re-evaluate the imported
>> symbol and reconstruct a medical recipe. The purpose of these
>> baby-steps exercises is porting a medical recipe program I've written
>> originally in Forth that allowed me to service 5.000 patients creating
>> a little database of shorthand recipes that then expand into real
>> medical recipes. I got hundreds of patients on renewable recipes for,
>> say, hypertension. Hand writing is no fun. Typing them in Word is no
>> fun. The hospital has is its own software, but it's is a load of
>> baloney, extremely buggy, if you ask me, so I'm rolling my own again,
>> except I want to print directly on the model paper our service uses,
>> so I want graphics like Racket Scheme has (very good capabilities, as
>> far as my needs are concerned).
>>
>> With Forth, it's very easy to design DSLs, because there's no syntax
>> and you get a lot of advanced features for free. For instance, there's
>> no need to write a parser for my little language. However, since Forth
>> implementations fall short of dealing with images, graphics (unless
>> you take the royal road to pain and learn to program for the Win32 API
>> and how it works for a particular Forth vendor), I'm looking at Racket
>> Scheme.