From: Lennon Day-Reynolds <rcoder@...>
Date: 2004-07-15T15:28:29+09:00
Subject: Re: my ruby code won't go as fast as my perl code

I'm not sure how the performance would compare, but if you really want
to write this in the "Ruby style," you might consider using the
DateTime class from the standard 'date' modue.

Ex:

require 'date'
d = DateTime.parse('31-DEC-03 12:59:59')
d.year
 => 3
d.month
 => 12
d.hour
 => 12

(etc., etc.)

In general, though, I usually feel that any time my Ruby code is
running within a constant factor of the time equivalent Perl (or
Python) code takes, I'm probably not doing anything wrong. If I start
to see more troublesome scaling issues, though, (i.e., exponential
runtime increases relative to input size) then there's probably
something that needs to be done to the code.

Lennon