[ruby-talk:8380] Re: Something like Perl's Inline module for Ruby?

Brian Ingerson wrote:

# Phil Tomson wrote:
# 
# > I sent an email to the author of Inline.pm to ask if he could create a
# > flavor for Ruby (to allow the insertion of Ruby code into a perl 
script)
# > and he replied that he was just looking into Ruby and was very
# > enthusiastic about the language so far.  And in fact he is planning to 
do
# > the next flavor of Inline for Ruby! (Inline::Ruby).  He raised an
# 
# Hi all. My name is Brian Ingerson. As Phil stated, I have written a
# perl module called Inline.pm that lets you write Perl
# subroutines/methods in other languages like C, C++, and Python (so
# far). 
[...] 
# The point of this is to make it very easy to extend Perl with C. For 
# more info/examples of Inline see 
# http://search.cpan.org/search?mode=module&query=inline%3A%3A

While I don't have an immediate need for this, that seems like a
really *great* feature for one-shot extensions and for implicitly
prototyping extensions before/without having to learn how to do it
explicitly.

# I have only been playing around with Ruby for about 5 days now, but
# I really like it. 

Welcome!

# Ruby builds on Perl, as Perl builds on C. So it seems to me that
# having an Inline feature for Ruby would be more useful than
# Inline::Ruby for Perl.

I agree with your conclusion, but for somewhat different reasons: (1)
the enormous size and capability of CPAN relative to RAA at present,
and (2) the enormous Perl population relative to the present Ruby
population means that for reasons of migratory statistics, far more
Perl people will be learning Ruby (as I did) than vice versa. 

Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)