From: pharrington <xenogenesis@...>
Date: 2010-01-27T13:05:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Distressing Doc

On Jan 26, 10:37 pm, burke <burke.lib...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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

Python's definitely compiled into bytecode. Perl is also compiled at
runtime.