Hey, thanks. Yeah, I haven't yet fully explained all of the simulator.

0xfe is a random number - a new random byte is generated on every instruction.

0xff contains the ASCII code of the last key pressed.

My simulator is adapted from the one at http://6502asm.com/beta/index.html - that has a help screen with some more info. I mostly cleaned up the (atrocious) JavaScript and added a memory monitor and disassembler (and implemented a few instructions they'd left out).

> A friend of mine used to refer to code that was more art than engineering as “clever.”

I see "clever" code as the opposite of good engineering and art. Beautiful code isn't "clever". An elegant engineering solution isn't "clever".

> As someone who conjured this exact thing up in another language after reading SICP

Me too! http://jsfiddle.net/skilldrick/vT2mC/

I didn't get very far with it though - the combined issues of JavaScript's lack of tail-call optimisation and its verbose lambda syntax made building streams to painful.

This looks like an interesting approach, though you'll never get around JS's heavy lambdas (unless you use CoffeeScript or something).

Cheers. I guess you could call it an internal DSL, but I wouldn't call it an interpreter - all it's manipulating is the arguments object, it doesn't manipulate any strings. I'm sure string manipulation isn't the only thing that identifies an interpreter, but it doesn't seem like that to me.

I'd recommend coming back and reading it when you've learned a bit more Ruby then. If you've "just started" then you probably don't yet have the experience in Ruby to understand what it means.

I understand that at a first glance this looks like basic stuff that doesn't explain anything useful, but with a bit more experience you'll see that it's fundamental to understanding how Ruby will react in certain situations.

It's a bit like saying "I see a lot of women have jobs these days - does that mean that feminism is more than just a fad?" You're not going to get any helpful responses if you ask something inflammatory (and I think it shows maturity that no-one's flamed you).

Anyway, what would you gain from asking a bunch of Ruby developers whether Ruby is "just a fad"? This is hardly the best venue for that question.

Incidentally, I didn't downvote you, just thought I'd try to explain why nobody responded to you.

> Note that this is a basic explanation, and glosses over higher-level concepts like the eigenclass/metaclass (I’ll leave that for a later post).

Glossing over those things misses the entire point. Not worth posting without it. The videos mentioned in the parent comment get it so right. Highly recommended.

It's essential to know this stuff to really understand how Ruby works. If you want to know which method is going to get called then you need to grok the object model. Classes in Ruby are much more than "fancy structs with allocation", and thinking of them in that way means you'll be losing out on a lot of Ruby's power.

Completely OT, but when I saw your comment, I new I recognised your handle, but couldn't think why. I finally worked it out though - you answered my first ever Stack Overflow question in 2009! http://stackoverflow.com/questions/418465/is-a-preference-fo...