From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2004-09-16T04:09:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Ex-Perl coders: Howz it feel to convert to Ruby?

Hi,

From: "Chris" <ceo@nospan.on.net>
>
> As already stated, I can usually whack out a concise, tight solution in 
> Perl in just a little bit of time.  I'm anxious to see if I can get to 
> that place in Ruby and what that would look like.  This sounds like Ruby 
> might be more suited to "bigger" tasks and Perl to the small ones.  I'm 
> sure others will jump in here momentarily and dispute this...

One of the things that thrilled me with ruby was that
it didn't force me to give up quick one-off hack style
scripting, in order to have a cleaner language for bigger
tasks....

I invoke ruby from the command line fairly frequently,
for random things like:

ruby -i -pe 'gsub(/\015/,"")' *.cpp *.h

If I recall my perl correctly (been about three years now)
the perl is slightly shorter:

perl -i -pe 's/\015//g' *.cpp *.h

But ruby has proved sufficiently concise for my needs 
in this regard.  Actually, sometimes the ruby comes out
shorter than what I think the equivalent perl would be.

Couple days ago a friend who has been learning ruby
asked me about making a program to gather and print a
sorted list of all unique IP addresses in a logfile he
had.  (He said a simple string-based sort was OK, and
the logfile structure was simple enough that a very
basic regexp would identify IP addrs without false
positives.)  I first approached the problem with a
hash, as I would have in Perl... and then I remembered
ruby has Array#uniq....  So the solution ended up
being:

puts ARGF.read.scan(/\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+/).uniq.sort

=D

Not effing bad, we both thought.  :)


Regards,

Bill