From: Bulat Ziganshin <bulatz@...>
Date: 2002-09-26T23:24:39+09:00
Subject: Re: adding overload to ruby

Hello William,

Thursday, September 26, 2002, 5:54:30 PM, you wrote:

WDT> Hi All,

WDT> I sense that this discussion is related to a previous question, "Has a    
WDT> 'Scripting Language' Been Used for Real Business/Corporate World
WDT> (read: large-scale) Applications?"

WDT> Also a person asked before that since there is no compile-time type
WDT> checking, probably that is what hinders a "scripting language" from being
WDT> used in large scale corporate development.

WDT> We all know the facts that large-scale software, including Ruby  
WDT> itself, currently is almost always written in C, C++, or Java.  (Yes,
WDT> probably there are others, such as Eiffel, but I don't know.)  And we see
WDT> that these "large-scale software" languages all have type
WDT> declarations.  We all know the benefits of type declaration, although it
WDT> usually increases the development time.

WDT> Now, I think we have two options.  First, it seems that some people
WDT> (myself included) are really interested in doing large scale software
WDT> development in Ruby.  This has resulted in the discussion on "private
WDT> variables" among other things.  Now, we are discussing
WDT> "overloading".  This is good, but the only problem is that if we keep
WDT> adding more complexity (read: not language library) to the language
WDT> itself, I think we are doing the same thing to Ruby what has happened to C
WDT> by C++.

WDT> The second option is we do not change Ruby too much, and we leave large   
WDT> scale software development problem to the core by writing the core in C,  
WDT> C++, or Java (with JRuby) and use Ruby more on the interface.  Surely we
WDT> don't like to write in C/C++/Java, but from performance alone (Java may be
WDT> excluded), probably it is the right thing to do.

WDT> Finally, since people love writing in Ruby so much, probably more research
WDT> should be done on how to ultimately create a translator from Ruby to, say,
WDT> C.  Even the rb2c web page
WDT> (http://easter.kuee.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~hiwada/ruby/rb2c/) states that you can
WDT> get scripts run "a little bit faster".

that's because of dynamic typing. even when you write "2+2" you don't
know whether answer will be 4 or 5 :)

declaring argument types can be on the way to effectively compiling
ruby; i think that prototyping w/o strict typing and writing real
program with strict typing will be "right way" :)

on the other hand, we can use type declarations to statically select
implementation of method, so that

Fixnum a
return a+1

can be translated in integer addition and not method call


-- 
Best regards,
 Bulat                            mailto:bulatz@integ.ru