From: burke <burke.libbey@...>
Date: 2010-01-27T12:40:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Distressing Doc

I can assure you that ruby is not compiled (nor are python or perl).
The reason bash takes so much longer for a seemingly similar
computation is that bash variables are untyped -- everything is stored
as a character string. This means that for each step where in ruby you
simply check and decrement a value, bash must parse a string to an
integer, check if it's greater than zero, parse the same string as an
integer again, subtract one from it, then convert that integer to a
string.

> If Ruby wasn't being compiled, I think the run time would be comparable
> to Bourne shell.  I suspect that what they meant by that statement in
> the doc is that there is no way to SAVE the compiled version, but the
> compiled version does exist in ram.

Burke