From: Simen Edvardsen <toalett@...>
Date: 2006-09-17T06:42:08+09:00
Subject: Re: the future of Ruby

On 9/16/06, Joan Iglesias <joan.iglesias@yahoo.es> wrote:
> Hello
>
> I'm studing Ruby and in a short Ruby in Rails for the web development.
> I've observed that each verion of Ruby can introduce modifications in
> the sintax and behaviour of Ruby. In the other hand I suppose the
> comunity develop libraries in the stable release of the moment. The
> question is:
>
> What about backward compatibilty? If I write a Ruby program using 1.8.5,
> in the future I'll be able to run in using the Ruby 2.0? What about the
> libraries developed under 1.8 Ruby?
>
> If I have to develop a professional Ruby program for a company, and one
> day I have to update the Ruby's engine, or the ruby's version just
> because of a security hole, it would be a bad surprise that nothing
> works...
>
> Someone can clarify all this questions please? I would like to program
> in Ruby, but not at any price...
>
> Thank you very much!
>
> Joan
>
> --
> Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
>

"Ruby2 will be slightly incompatible, the changes will not only
consist of additions but also of syntax improvements (hopefully a
better syntax will result)."

That's from http://wiki.rubygarden.org/Ruby/page/show/Rite. A new
major version, I think, should be allowed to have some backwards
incompatibilities, so it doesn't have to be suffer from old heritage
(think C++), but minor versions should minimize them.

Paul Lutus wrote:
> It would be fatal for a language maintainer to create a new language version
> that invalidates a lot of old programs.

Indeed. Ideally features that are to be removed should be deprecated
some time before being removed, so people know that they should
avoid/fix code that uses it.

-- 
- Simen