From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2010-04-30T01:03:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Use of STDOUT.flush after puts

2010/4/29 Alex DeCaria <alex.decaria@millersville.edu>:
> Thanks everyone.  That is very helpful.  My remaining questions is "Why
> isn't Ruby's default state such that STDOUT.sync is always 'true'?  In
> other words, what's the advantage of having standard output buffered
> rather than instantaneous?  In every program I've written in Ruby I've
> always wanted anything written to standard output to appear
> instantaneously.

Maybe because it is more efficient for the general case and there
might not be a reliable platform independent way to detect the type of
output (terminal, file, pipe...).

Btw, different Ruby implementations seem to not agree on the default value:

18:00:33 ~$ allruby -e 'p $stdout.sync'
CYGWIN_NT-5.1 padrklemme1 1.7.5(0.225/5/3) 2010-04-12 19:07 i686 Cygwin
========================================
ruby 1.8.7 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 72) [i386-cygwin]
false
========================================
ruby 1.9.1p378 (2010-01-10 revision 26273) [i386-cygwin]
false
========================================
jruby 1.4.0 (ruby 1.8.7 patchlevel 174) (2009-11-02 69fbfa3) (Java
HotSpot(TM) Client VM 1.6.0_20) [x86-java]
true
18:01:14 ~$

Kind regards

robert

-- 
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