From: Quinn Dunkan <quinn@...>
Date: 2000-03-25T19:58:34-08:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:02171] Re: Array Gotchas


Dat
> Please, irb.rb is more solid than eval.rb.
> Better, Ruby could be interactive by dafault like Tcl and Python.

Hmm, I like the ruby listener being written in ruby rather than C or
something, then you can subclass and create your own customizations.  However,
irb suffers from being poorly documented/advertised and incomplete (it will
SyntaxError valid code, and get in a weird state where strange things happen
relatively easily).

Especially lost-souls coming from non-listener-oriented languages like C and
perl should be informed of its existence and use (and they may be a bit
frusterated when it doesn't work right :)

Advertising is easy:  mention it in the very beginning of the tutorial and
manual, and put in a more prominent place than hiding deep in the library.
And about the bugs:  are they simply bugs, or are there nasty sticky issues
when trying to interactively parse code (python has one such issue: how to
tell if you're at the end of a block, which it solves by making you type an
extra \n, but python's grammar is a lot simpler than ruby's)?

Or maybe I just need to go download the latest version..