From: TLOlczyk <olczyk2002@...>
Date: 2004-07-02T11:37:48+09:00
Subject: Re: Why I don't use Ruby.

On Thu, 01 Jul 2004 10:45:54 GMT, gabriele renzi
<surrender_it@remove.yahoo.it> wrote:

>
>>It would also be nice to have an optional core/image.
>>That way if I run tests where testing uses a lot of data,
>>I can save images when i debug later stages and
>>save myself some time initializing.
>
>I'm not sure what you mean here. Do you want to freeze the interpreter
>in a given state? Or do you feel the need for some serialization
>format that can be retrieved at any time fast? (in this case Marshal
>could fit, maybe?)
Sigh. The way things are going today, I've finally gotten to Usenet
today, but on the radio is a very good discussion of the American
Revolution. So I can't pay attention to the whole thread, but
I will discuss this part. 

Let us as an example look at a program that looks at a directory of
Web pages, and traces through them. If it cannot find a link to a
certain page, then it creates a link on a page in a prescribed manner.

You've written the program and tested it on a small data set.
Now you want to test it on a large data set. It fails miserably 
and you try to debug.
Phase one of the program gets a list of all the files in the directory
( recursively ).
Phase two is to scan the root files for hrefs. Then scan the files in
the hrefs. Then ... untill there are no more files to scan.
Phase three is to pick some file you didn't reach and create a link to
it.

So you work on Phase one and get it to run.
Then you work on Phase two. But it takes Phase one
ten minutes to run. So each time you test a fix in phase two
it takes at least ten minutes to run.

So you save an image at the end of phase one. Each time
you test phase two, you load the image from phase one
and just test phase two. Save ten minutes on each test run.


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**
Thaddeus L. Olczyk, PhD

There is a difference between
*thinking* you know something,
and *knowing* you know something.