From: Dan Sugalski <dan@...>
Date: 2002-07-21T07:20:39+09:00
Subject: Re: Objective C backend for Ruby?

At 6:04 PM -0400 7/20/02, Brad Cox wrote:
>At 5:45 AM +0900 7/21/02, Dan Sugalski wrote:
>>I was looking at the translator aspect, translating Ruby to 
>>Objective-C. That was the part that was the real non-starter, 
>>courtesy of continuations. (I've got a paper or two kicking around 
>>about some of the interesting things that the Scheme folks had to 
>>do to get continuations going with what's essentially a C 
>>environment. It's... interesting)
>
>If I might throw out a suggestion, if its not broke, don't fix it. 
>Ruby's written in C so its ALREADY written in Objective-C. Leave 
>that alone.

I'd agree. If folks want to toss the interpreter, you might as well 
go all out and generate machine code directly. It turns out not to be 
nearly as tricky to do semi-portably as most people think. (Well, at 
least as much as I thought)

>Ruby DOES need a better user interface. This is Objective-C's 
>object-oriented strong suit. Focus your energy there, on where Ruby 
>is broken, not where its intact.

Yep. I expect Ruby would mix very well with Cocoa on OS X--I know 
perl does with the CamelBones library, and for Cocoa-ish things Ruby 
and Perl are pretty much equivalent in semantics. (Ruby's got an edge 
here in OO features) There's a certain nifty feeling to laying out 
your GUI with Interface Builder and realizing the biggest difference 
on the app code end is the method calls look like object->method 
rather than [object method]...
-- 
                                         Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                       teddy bears get drunk