From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2005-01-15T06:16:11+09:00
Subject: Re: Irb and Ruby Separation

Nicholas Van Weerdenburg wrote:

> I've been wondering about why are irb and ruby separate programs.

The benefit is that IRB is a Ruby program, making it easier to patch it 
or to do funky stuff. (Like I've done with the Breakpoint library.)

I think it is a good thing to get above the C level whenever you can. 
There's a downside of course: IRB needs to re implement some of the 
functionality that Ruby already has. (It needed to implement it's own 
Lexer, for example, nowadays it could use Ripper instead, but it would 
still need to find out whether an expression is already finished or not.)