From: gregarican <greg.kujawa@...>
Date: 2006-07-11T09:40:11+09:00
Subject: Re: Why Ruby over Python?

For me it's not so much the shelling out as it is invoking some Ruby
methods that deal with files, directories, etc. or trying to use a
setup.rb Ruby routine that is trying to parse through the Windows
directory structure. Unfortunately some Ruby projects are still
maintained with a Linux focus and the support for Windows is lacking. I
have tried to manually "rig" fixes so that they can work with my
Windows platform but after an hour or so of futile effort I just switch
over to a Python alternative that does the same thing. Examples are
LDAP, Qt, and a few others. This was about a year ago so things might
have improved since then. YMMV...

Tim Hammerquist wrote:
> Jeffrey Schwab <jeff@schwabcenter.com> wrote:
> > The one thing that sticks in my craw about Ruby is that
> > File::Separator is a forward-slash ('/') on Windows.  This is just
> > wrong, and it means I have to replace the slashes with back-slashes
> > manually before passing file paths to command-line programs.  If you
> > pass a Windows program a path like /some/path, the program will try
> > to interpret path elements as switches.  It's almost the equivalent
> > of having File::Separator be a hyphen ('-') on Unix.
>
> Aside from the obvious argument that making filesep '\' in DOS was the
> first mistake, I'm curious what command-line programs are useful
> enough that you shell out from the language you're writing in?
> 
> Tim Hammerquist