From: Simon Strandgaard <0bz63fz3m1qt3001@...>
Date: 2003-06-25T00:30:02+09:00
Subject: Re: proposal for a ruby expert system

On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 10:50:04 +0000, Lyle Johnson wrote:

> Simon Strandgaard wrote:
> 
>> I know there exist expert-systems for decices.. Something similar would be
>> nice to have when developing Ruby-applications.
>>                 [...]
>> Is there already such system around ?
> 
> Yes, the ruby-talk mailing list ;)

They are very similar.. but when problems tend to be too complex and
confusing on ruby-talk, then people bails out. No replyes, is not useful. 

If people ends up in a corner of the rules, where it cannot compute any
good answers.. then the user should be able to contribute, if she finds a
solution (ala wiki).

I tried doing a search on google, in order to see if there are any such
expert systems around, which can assist you with hard-debugging.
But there doesn't seems to be any online+free systems around.

You can do many things to catch errors before they occur:
* test-first of everything
* unittesting
* assertions
* don't assume too much

But when hard errors occur.. you are on your own:
* output tons of debug info.
* record sequences courses the error.
* step-by-step debugging.

Thats about it... The issues about Ruby's behavier, I don't know enough 
about. This is what I hope that a ruby-expert-system could tell me:
* are you aware that Ruby-1.6.8 has a bug in Array#method.
* a=[1,2];b=a;b[1]=3;p a   #=> [1, 3]
* other kinds of secret ruby information.
* propose ideas how to solve these paticular problems.



First question it could ask you, could be:

Q:  Which version of Ruby do you use ?
o   1.6.7
o   1.6.8
o   1.7.2
o   1.8.0


hmm... i don't know how to do it..  it would take much efforts, but it
would be really nice :-)

--
Simon Strandgaard