From: Steven Lumos <slumos@...>
Date: 2003-12-11T09:52:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Ideas for replacing $0==__FILE__


I've recently found that it is sometimes useful to combine a "main"
Ruby program with required modules into a single file.  Aside from
being able to deliver the program as a single file, I've seen about a
10% improvement to load time.  I'm even thinking it would be nice to
have a program to do it for me.

Needless to say, the fact that everybody else in my team was using the
$0 == __FILE__ idiom in their modules was a serious pain initially.

From this perspective, it would be nice to have a mechanism that (1)
is not enabled by default, and especially (2) is easy to parse out.

Do people really consider this idiom to be *that* useful? Most of the
times I've seen it used, it wraps either examples (better done in
separate files, you can have more than one and more complex), or tests
(*much* better done with Test::Unit).

Steve