[ruby-talk:00443]

Hello,

I have some basic questions about ruby:

o   What is the "standard" way to use ruby interactively, like a shell?   

o   Why is the -debug flag special?  When writing/running a dynamically
    typed interactive program (like a gui), I *expect* errors, and
    getting a full, traversible stack trace with source file and line
    number information is *critical* (to me, at least).  Shouldn't
    the debugger be part of the ruby core?

    Put another way, is there a way to load a file, stay in the ruby
    toplevel, execute a few functions, and enter the debugger when
    errors occur?

    [ As an aside: Python does this properly, as does Gambit-C (a
      Scheme variant); perl, tcl, bash, and all other free Scheme
      implementations I found (STk, bigloo, elk, scheme48, scm, guile,
      stalin) have pitiful debugging support. ]

Thanks,
Michael