From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2008-09-24T11:30:42+09:00
Subject: Re: Using Ruby as a scripting language within a C app

On Tuesday 23 September 2008 15:03:42 Marc Heiler wrote:
> > I'd question why you'd want to write any of the rest of it in C, but 
> > that's a different issue :-)
> 
> I am not the original author, but personally I always enjoy it when 
> people do not ask why I want to do something that way, but rather help 
> how i do it.

There are advantages to both. Consider the hypothetical question:
"How can I delete every file on my hard drive with a single command?"

If there's an easy way to do what I want to do, I'd like to know it.
"rm -rf /"

However, in the same message, it might be helpful to suggest other ways of 
thinking about the problem:

"Well, if you really want the data gone (to hide it), best 'dd if=/dev/zero 
of=/dev/sda'. And if you only need to nuke a particular directory, you 
can 'rm -rf /foo' -- but you may want to look up 'shred' first."

I might learn something. It might even save me weeks of work -- might stop me 
from nuking my whole hard drive, in the above (contrived) example.

If not, it doesn't waste very much time to read them and ignore them.

So, I think Brian's post was actually helpful in that he's pointed out a few 
useful resources for embedding a Ruby interpreter, and also suggested that it 
might be better to write it in Ruby. (I'd second that -- a MUD doesn't have 
to be fast, but it's better if it's flexible, and it really shouldn't take 
long.)