From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2004-07-02T13:28:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Why I don't use Ruby.


From: "TLOlczyk" <olczyk2002@yahoo.com>
> 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.

Although different than saving the whole program image,
It's pretty to load/save entire object hierarchies in
Ruby... For ex:

# A little boilerplate...

require 'yaml/store'
ystore = YAML::Store.new("my_persistent_data")

# At the end of phase one, we'll have our file list,
# which we can persist as easily as:

ystore.transaction { ystore["filelist"] = phase_one_filelist }

# At the beginning of phase two, we can load it:

phase_one_filelist = ystore.transaction { ystore["filelist"] }


. . . This would allow phase 1 and 2 to be totally separate
ruby programs, if you like.

Just one possibility...


Regards,

Bill