From: Eivind Eklund <eeklund@...>
Date: 2005-10-02T21:33:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Large Ruby Apps ?

On 9/30/05, Leonardo Eloy <leonardo.eloy@gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree that some sort of static analysis would allow Ruby codes to more
> tightly immune to "bugs" (as Seltzer said).
>
> But the nature of Ruby's dynamism wouldn't allow that any sort of effort in
> this area will work properly,

I believe this is incorrect.  It should be possible to do a lot of 
static analysis in Ruby, it's just that there is some type inference
etc that needs to be done first, and that is a significant amount of
work to implement.

An oldish reference that cover this fairly well is Ole Agesen's PhD
thesis "Concrete Type Inference: Delivering Object-Oriented
Applications" (available from
http://research.sun.com/techrep/1996/abstract-52.html)

That reference is based on work done in the language Self, which is
prototype based, and contains the same challenges as (pure) Ruby. 
Things get much more complex if C is thrown into the mix, of course.

--
Hazzle free packages for Ruby?
RPA is available from http://www.rubyarchive.org/