From: "Hal E. Fulton" Date: 2002-07-31T00:20:33+09:00 Subject: Re: Opinion on Ruby maturity, the missing things ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul E.C. Melis" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ruby To: "ruby-talk ML" Sent: Friday, July 26, 2002 5:31 AM Subject: Re: Opinion on Ruby maturity, the missing things > Sure, but that won't make them very useful without the original variable > names and lack of documentation, to name a few. It's not about counteracting > reverse-engineering, it's about keeping others from simply stealing your > code, which is darn easy when it's just sitting there unprotected in a text > file. True enough. I wonder if there is room/need for an automatic obfuscator? Would be fairly easy for most cases, perhaps impossible in the general case. (For example, if a string is built dynamically and then eval'd, it may depend on the existence of certain variables which would be difficult/impossible to rename then). > > I have yet to see a perl app that is shipped only in bytecode form, yet > > Perl is weirder than Ruby and more popular with the PHB's > > You probably wouldn't have mentioned this if I had been clearer in the > original post. I have _never_ seen an application that has Perl embedded in > it. Perl scripts are distributed frequently with apps, but they are almost > always stand-alone or use a pipe or socket to talk to the main application. > And I have also never seen a bytecode compiled version of Perl script, but > this should change with version 6 and Parrot coming up. Well, there is such a thing as PerlScript (ActiveStatePerl, I guess?). And the HomeSeer app is one case where (some) people do use embedded Perl in this way (www.homeseer.com). And there is ActiveScriptRuby (by arton) which works fine in general, but I can't get it to work in HomeSeer. Guess we're wandering offtopic now, though. And I'm replying days after the fact, since I've been out of town. Hal