From: Chris Gehlker <gehlker@...>
Date: 2002-02-22T05:52:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Now I'm really confused!

On 2/20/02 12:37 PM, "Chris Gehlker" <gehlker@fastq.com> wrote:

> I'm still struggling with producing RubyStudio. The following example
> illustrates my dilemma:
> 
> This works from the shell:
> $stdout.print "Enter a string:"
> a = $stdin.gets
> 
> But hangs the thread in RubyStudio that's waiting to see some output from
> Ruby. This however works in both environments:
> 
> $stdout.print "Enter a string:"
> $stdout.flush
> a = $stdin.gets
> 
> What I can't figure out is why Ruby behaves differently depending on how it
> was launched. Does tcsh set some environmental variable that tells Ruby not
> to buffer output? I printed out man tcsh but it's a small book without an
> index. Please help.
> 
> TIA
> Chris

Here I go answering my own question. I'm doing this for the sake of the
archive. It turns out that there are two solutions, at least.

The easy one is to prepend
$stdout.sync= true
To the program in the IDE's source window.

The hard way is to use setvbuf() from C. I say that its the hard way because
it would require me to drop out of the high level cocoa API and write a lot
of RubyStudio in straight C.

There may be another way using BSD file descriptors. I'm going to go look
that up.
-- 
There is, nevertheless, a certain respect and a general duty of humanity
that ties us, not only to beasts that have life and sense, but even to
trees and plants. -Michel de Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592)