From: "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@...>
Date: 2003-04-10T22:20:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Programming Languages Wiki Ruby entry.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng" <hgs@dmu.ac.uk>
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2003 7:17 AM
Subject: Programming Languages Wiki Ruby entry.


> http://cliki.tunes.org/Ruby
> 
> has an odd (to my mind) first paragraph
> <quote>
> A interpreted object-oriented programming language based on the
> concepts of Smalltalk while being oriented to command-line
> processing almost exclusively, so it has a terse punctuation-style
> syntax with libraries centered around text-processing and Unix shell
> functionality. It interestingly supports continuations, although
> this is not an advertised feature.
> </quote>

This does sound strange to me.
 
> "oriented to command-line processing almost exclusively"?  Doesn't
> sound like Ruby to me.  I'm not even sure what this means -- is it
> "for implementing shells" or "Ruby is little more than Getopt"?

I wonder if they mean it doesn't have an IDE like
Smalltalk's? I don't know Smalltalk, but I've 
heard the IDE is a big part of it.

> "it has a terse punctuation-style syntax"?  Compared with what?
> [COBOL? :-)]

Probably they saw the Perl side of Ruby and made
assumptions based on that.

> Maybe someone more on the academic side of computer science can
> understand what was really meant here, and suggest mods to this.  I
> think CLU and Perl probably should be mentioned near Smalltalk....

This should be a group effort perhaps.

Hal