From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2003-01-23T23:27:33+09:00
Subject: Re: Single vs double quotes and performance?

On Thursday, January 23, 2003, 6:53:11 AM, Daniel wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 23, 2003 at 03:40:22AM +0900, E F van de Laar wrote:
>> Is my nitpicking going to help me out in the long run or am I just
>> waisting my time here.  This minor issue has been itching my brain
>> for a while now. :)

> $ cat single_quotes  
> 100_000.times { puts 'Hello World' }
> $ cat double_quotes 
> 100_000.times { puts "Hello World" }

> $ time ruby single_quotes
> [snip]
> real    0m22.812s
> user    0m2.220s
> sys     0m1.660s
> $ time ruby double_quotes
> real    0m21.614s
> user    0m2.100s
> sys     0m1.600s

> The significant measure is 'user'.  You can expect to save 0.1 seconds 
> after printing 100 thousand strings.

                                    
I hope you din't mind me nitpicking.  In each of those programs, you
only define a single string.  You are not measuring the time to
construct a string with single-vs-double quotes, you are measuring the
time to print 100000 already-constructed strings!

Perhaps the 0.1 second time difference is explained by the fact that
the double-quoted version needs to look for more special characters.
But I doubt it.

Gavin