[ruby-talk:6733] perl and ruby

I'm a perl guy checking out ruby.  I wanted to benchmark a few things that
I do a lot of (using hashes, split, etc...).  So here is a little snippet:

A couple of things I noticed which sort of annoyed me:
I had to predeclare the hash and the scaler.  x++ didn't
work (which I found out from the FAQ). x = x +1; gave a
syntax error.  interpolation with #{var} doesn't seem as
user friendly...

I'm not here to bash ruby, I am just starting to explore it, it looks
like a fun language, I just wanted to point out some things that
a perl person may find annoying in the hopes that perhaps some
of these things can be changed.

Here are the scripts:


print `date`;
x = 0;  # must initialize... why?
h = {};  # again, must initialize... why?
for i in 0..10
   arr = "hello world hello word".split(/\s/)
   for b in arr
      h[b] = b
      h[b] = h[1]
      x += 1  # x++ doesn't work. bummer of the summer.
      # x = x +1; # syntax error...
  end
end

print "x: #{x}\n"
print `date`;


Then in perl:
print `date`;
for(0..10) {
  (@arr) = split(/\s/,"hello world hello word");
  foreach  (@arr) {
    $h{$_} = $_;
    $h{$_} = $a{1};
    $x++;
  }
}
print "x: $x\n";
print `date`;

thanks,
-joe