From: Giuseppe Bilotta <bilotta78@...>
Date: 2002-08-23T21:58:20+09:00
Subject: RE: Converting Perl scripts to Ruby?

Berger, Daniel wrote:
> 
> Such a beast would be incredibly difficult to write.  The problem with
> writing something to convert Perl to Ruby would not only be the difficulty
> of parsing, but also the paradigm shift that occurs when moving from Perl to
> Ruby.  In other words, you could convert from a functional style to a
> functional style, but it would be difficult to convert it to an OO paradigm.
> 
> This is not to minimize the problems with parsing.  Can you imagine trying
> to parse an convert some of the more obfuscated code?  Yikes!
> 
> As it stands, if you know Perl and have a decent handle on Ruby it's not
> that difficult to 'translate' the syntax.  For the most part, the functions
> in Perl are class or instance methods in Ruby (there are a few exceptions).
> To give you an idea, it took me less than a day (and probably only about 2
> hours) to convert version .11 of John McNamara's Spreadsheet::WriteExcel
> module into a working Ruby version.
> 

I see, thank you. Guess abusing Ruby's OO paradigm to bend it to 
quasi-functional writing wouldn't help either, uh?

-- 
Giuseppe "Oblomov" Bilotta

Axiom I of the Giuseppe Bilotta
theory of IT:
Anything is better than MS