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.pra...@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.le...@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. ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users