From: Shane Liesegang <shane@...>
Date: 2007-08-27T23:46:05+09:00
Subject: Re: IRB module with non-blocking asynchronous gets

Hi James. Thanks for the recommendations.

James Gray wrote:
> 
> Is that what you are after?  If it is, do we really need IRb at all?
> How's this:

I could just use eval to run the strings; that's true. I was hoping to 
leverage IRB's prompt mechanism and the ability to define functions on 
the fly. As below:

-----
irb(main):001:0> def test
irb(main):002:1>   puts "testing..."
irb(main):003:1>   end
=> nil
irb(main):004:0> test
testing...
=> nil
irb(main):005:0>
-----

I'm finding that it's pretty tricky, though. I managed to make it 
non-blocking for a single line by overriding eval_input and having it 
break after evaluating a line instead of waiting for input. That seems 
to work fine, but when doing any kind of multi-line input, it still goes 
into a loop that it doesn't want to return from.

It seems like IRB, to its core, is based on constantly waiting for 
input, and trying to make it work in an on-demand fashion is like 
running uphill. I'm still rooting through its source, trying to find the 
spots where I can poke at it to make it work that way, but it's slow 
going with a large mass of interrelated code that's not terribly easy 
for humans to parse. :-)
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