From: harryo@... (Harry Ohlsen)
Date: 2001-02-20T17:55:45+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:11161] Re: Ruby success stories?

>Also, I'm supposed to compare Ruby to Perl, Python and Java (I really 
>don't think Java is appropriate for this problems space due to lack of 
>built-in regex and ways of running external apps, but I'll give it 
>a shot).

There's a third-party Java library for regular expressions that
accepts the same syntax as Perl.  I'll see if I can find a URL ...

	http://jakarta.apache.org/oro/index.html

I've used this before and it is excellent.  As far as I recall, his
licence is such that you can use it for commercial purposes, so long
as you're not building a product to on-sell.  Ie, if it's used to
write something that your company will use.

Of course, as you say, this is not bult-in.  But, of course, most of
the built-in libraries are written in Java, so there's nothing
particularly strange about using a third-party library like this, so
long as the licence agreement doesn't hinder you.

With regard to  executing other programs from inside Java, you can use
something like the following ...

	String command = "ls";

	Process process = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(command);

If you're interested, I have a small wrapper class I wrote, called
Shell, that hides most of the gory details of using a Process object.
I'd be happy to pass it on, if it would be of any use to you in your
evaluation.

I also have classes called Perl and Python ... if I was still writing
Java for a living, I'd have already whipped up a Ruby class :-) ...
that use this class to allow the sending of snippets of code to a Perl
or Python interpreter and retrieving the output.

Of course, I'm not trying to suggest you use Java rather than Ruby; it
just sounded like you might not know about these classes.