From: William James <w_a_x_man@...>
Date: 2007-09-25T00:15:14+09:00
Subject: Re: This is why Ruby 1.8.6 can never be made to run anywhere near as fast as Python 2.5.1

On Sep 24, 8:01 am, "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <zn...@cesmail.net>
wrote:
> William James wrote:
> > On Sep 23, 9:50 pm, Ruby Maniac <raych...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> Ruby is a cute language that may someday become useful
>
> > Someday when you are a more experienced programmer, you
> > may realize that doing bitwise operations on each byte
> > of a 2-megabyte file is not an appropriate task for a
> > "scripting language".  That calls for a lower-level language.
>
> Well ... if the bitwise operations are built into the "scripting
> language", why *shouldn't* they be used? It's not like you have to make
> them up by converting the bytes to floating point values, converting
> them to an array of floating point ones and zeroes and doing ANDs and
> ORs on them with floating point equality tests in IF statements!

It's a question of scale.  I'd certainly use it on a small file.
But as we've all seen, using it on a 20-megabyte file will make one
wish he'd used a faster language.