From: Dave@...
Date: 2002-07-30T12:52:58+09:00
Subject: Ruby Weekly News


   Ruby Weekly News: 07/29/2002

   A summary of activity on the ruby-talk mailing list, brought to you
   this week by Pat Eyler.

   ANNOUNCEMENTS
   =============

   Vim compiler plugin for Ruby
          a Ruby compiler plugin which sets 'errorformat' and 'makeprg'.
          The plugin has been approved for inclusion in future releases
          of Vim (> 601).

   YAML4R 0.26
          Another release of the YAML for Ruby project.

   OpenSSL for Ruby 0.1.2
          A bugfix release of OpenSSL for Ruby.

   RADIUS for Ruby
          A module that provides an interface to the RADIUS protocol from
          Ruby. The interface is somewhat based on the Perl Net::Radius
          module.

   INTERESTING THREADS
   ===================

   use of #missing_method
          Tom asked about the use of #missing_method, and was told that
          #method_missing was the better choice ;) ... it was also
          mentioned that #method_missing added some hidden flow control
          to your code and that if the end result were acheivable some
          other way that it would be preferable.

          The consensus seems to be that #method_missing is a powerful
          tool, and can save a great deal of time (especially when
          writing wrapper-code) if used carefully.

   piping into ruby at command line
          Shashank tried to do this:

          % cat junk.txt | ruby -e "puts $_"

          But didn't get what he expected. This proves to be another case
          of shell interpolation biting the user. If you leave things in
          double quotes, the shell will play games with it ... single
          quotes are (often) your friend.

   Can I get data back from a fork?
          Jim Freeze asked about getting data back from a forked process.
          The answer is that you need to set up IPC between the parent
          and child processes. Jim was pointed at the Pickaxe, Ch. 22
          (specifically IO#pipe) -- thanks Dave and Andy for such a great
          resource!

          The use of thread instead of fork, and the use of shared memory
          were also suggested.