I just joined the mailing list, having but read it through the web for
several weeks. I was prompted by reading the following:
That is a very good question. I think Matz's implementation is Ruby with
lots of practical and script-useful add-ons. It's an incredibly pragmatic
tool. A lot of this is owed to the language concepts.
Point is, because there’s only one implementation, there isn’t an
official(?) language standard yet. Ruby is not an academic ideal, it’s a
tangible tool.
I’m hoping to implement a pure language version. No perlisms, no FileIO, no
SAFE, no threads, just classes, modules, arrays, strings…enough for the
language itself to be complete.
I think the language has more potential than just competing with
Perl/Python.
How do you “add” anything to the language by taking things away? And what
potential does any language have without File IO? This seems like a step
towards an academic ideal, which is therefore almost guaranteed to be not
a useful tool! (Although I saw something written about embedding…sounds
interesting.)
Also, I strongly believe Ruby needs its “Perl” features. I learned Ruby
because Perl was frustrating me. I didn’t learn it for the fun of it (cos I
didn’t know it would be fun) - I learned it because I knew I would be able
to do so and complete my task in one day. And that’s only because it’s so
easy to port Perl to Ruby. Now I’ll never use Perl again - even though I
love it.
I’m sure I’m not alone there.
Sorry for this unorthodox way of chiming in. It, er, won’t happen again.
As long as you’re dealing with systems with no files, potentially
lots…
The majority of microprocessors on the Earth couldn’t do File IO if
they wanted to, since they aren’t connected to file systems or mass
storage. Think of the processors in your printer, mouse, monitor,
keyboard, microwave oven…
Now if the language couldn’t get to I/O registers, now that would be
a problem…
···
On Wednesday 31 July 2002 08:38 am, Gavin Sinclair wrote:
And what potential does any language have without File IO
How do you “add” anything to the language by taking things away? And what
potential does any language have without File IO? This seems like a step
towards an academic ideal, which is therefore almost guaranteed to be not
a useful tool! (Although I saw something written about embedding…sounds
interesting.)
Well, it would be very useful to me.
If we were talking about a reduced version of Perl then I’d agree - Perl as
a language seems to me like a typeless version of C with a lot of utility
built in.
However, I think Ruby has a very strong and appealing language core that
could be used outside of orthodox scripting. Embedding for example. For a
lot of reasons that just wouldn’t be possible with Ruby at the moment
because of all the extra utility.
···
–
Justin Johnson
“Gavin Sinclair” gsinclair@soyabean.com.au wrote in message
news:004801c238a8$4b406dd0$062386cb@nosedog…
I just joined the mailing list, having but read it through the web for
several weeks. I was prompted by reading the following:
That is a very good question. I think Matz's implementation is Ruby with
lots of practical and script-useful add-ons. It's an incredibly pragmatic
tool. A lot of this is owed to the language concepts.
Point is, because there’s only one implementation, there isn’t an
official(?) language standard yet. Ruby is not an academic ideal, it’s a
tangible tool.
I’m hoping to implement a pure language version. No perlisms, no FileIO,
no
SAFE, no threads, just classes, modules, arrays, strings…enough for the
language itself to be complete.
I think the language has more potential than just competing with
Perl/Python.
How do you “add” anything to the language by taking things away? And what
potential does any language have without File IO? This seems like a step
towards an academic ideal, which is therefore almost guaranteed to be not
a useful tool! (Although I saw something written about embedding…sounds
interesting.)
Also, I strongly believe Ruby needs its “Perl” features. I learned Ruby
because Perl was frustrating me. I didn’t learn it for the fun of it (cos
I
didn’t know it would be fun) - I learned it because I knew I would be able
to do so and complete my task in one day. And that’s only because it’s so
easy to port Perl to Ruby. Now I’ll never use Perl again - even though I
love it.
I’m sure I’m not alone there.
Sorry for this unorthodox way of chiming in. It, er, won’t happen again.
And what potential does any language have without File IO
As long as you’re dealing with systems with no files, potentially
lots…
The majority of microprocessors on the Earth couldn’t do File IO if
they wanted to, since they aren’t connected to file systems or mass
storage. Think of the processors in your printer, mouse, monitor,
keyboard, microwave oven…
Good point. Controlling these suckers using Ruby would be much better than
any conceivable alternative.
Now if the language couldn’t get to I/O registers, now that would be
a problem…
However, I think Ruby has a very strong and appealing language core that
could be used outside of orthodox scripting. Embedding for example. For
a
lot of reasons that just wouldn’t be possible with Ruby at the moment
because of all the extra utility.
Actually, one place this might be useful is
on the Palm OS. This has been discussed a lot,
but no one seems able/willing or has time to
make it happen.
Someone said Ruby would be good for embedding
if it could be squeezed under 32K. My uninformed
opinion is that this will never happen, even
with a recursive-descent parser hand-optimized
in assembly language. I recall well my Turbo
Pascal 3.0 from 1985 – Borland was notorious
for this kind of optimizing back then, when a
floppy disk was 360K and 128K was a lot of
RAM. The compiler then was 38K, and I’ll bet
they couldn’t have reduced it much farther.
And Ruby is more complex than Pascal.
Hal
···
----- Original Message -----
From: “Justin Johnson” justinj@mobiusent.com
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ruby
To: “ruby-talk ML” ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
Sent: Friday, August 02, 2002 4:53 AM
Subject: Re: Late contribution to discussions
But it’s not going to happen any time soon; Ruby’s footprint is much
too large.
Even Lua, which is promoted as being a small embedding language, has a
77K interpreter on my system. Even after one removed the Unix-isms
(File I/O, process control, etc.) I suspect that it would still be >
50K. Which is more ROM than most processors have available.
So people end up using cross-compiled native code (C, Asm, etc.) or
tiny interpreters like Forth instead.
Now if we could come up with a Ruby interpreter that would fit in 32K,
run programs from ROM, and require very little RAM, you’d have quite
a large embedded market (though people would whine about the 32K).
···
On Thursday 01 August 2002 12:48 pm, Gavin Sinclair wrote:
Good point. Controlling these suckers using Ruby would be much
better than any conceivable alternative.
