From: E F van de Laar <emiel@...>
Date: 2003-07-09T16:39:51+09:00
Subject: Re: How to create Shell Links on Windows?

* Timon Christl (me@christltimon.de) wrote:
> Hal E. Fulton wrote:
> >I can't answer your question -- my eventual goal is
> >to know less about Windows, not more -- but your
> 
> Me too. That's why I'm using ruby. Porting ruby scripts will be much 
> easier than porting entire Delphi/C/C++ programs, and I will have to do 
> that one day for my personal collection of homemade tools.
> 
> >mention of Delphi caught my eye. I haven't really
> >touched Delphi in years, but I was always impressed
> >by it.
> >
> >I assume you know about the Ruby/Delphi bridge that
> >someone has made? I think it's called Apollo... I can't
> >quite remember the author, but it's in the RAA.
> >
> >When I tested it out, I was very impressed with it. And
> >offhand I'd say it's possible that if Delphi exposes
> >some bit of functionality, then Apollo might very likely
> >expose that same bit to Ruby.
> 
> Yes I know about Apollo, but getting it to work with my trusty old 
> Delphi 3 could mean a bit of work, plus the code looked rather messy. 
> I've also tried to make my own binding (and even managed to define 
> ruby-callable classes and methods in Delphi, and call them), but I gave 
> it up later. Instead I wrote my own small OO language, which has the 
> same object model as ruby, but without the nifty stuff (modules, blocks, 
> mixins, continuations etc are all missing, but classes, meta-classs, 
> singleton methods are present) and of course with a much smaller class 
> library. It was roughly the same amount of work as creating a complete 
> binding to ruby, and much more fun (at least if you know how to write 
> compilers, which I do).
> 
> The problem is, I want to replace a small Delphi-written tool that is 
> only meant to be used on my home PC by a even smaller ruby script. It 
> would be a cleverly written one-liner if I use some of the usual unix 
> tools (ls, tail, sort and ln), but starting up a complete cygwin shell 
> takes a lot longer on my system than starting up a delphi executable (or 
> rubyw.exe).

Just thought I'd point out native Unix utils for win32. Windows
filesystems don't support symlinking(ln) but the other tools work great.

http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

Emiel
-- 
E F van de Laar
+31648183479
www.il.fontys.nl/~emiel