From: Brad <BCoish@...>
Date: 2003-12-18T03:16:59+09:00
Subject: Re: Very odd IO problem

Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:

> ruby -e 'puts `ruby -e "print "hello"`'


matz:

I tried the above example, but it has a syntax error, 3 ".
So, I tried adding a fourth " to balance out the quoting,
ruby didn't complain, but nothing was displayed either.

I also tried a variation on this:

ruby -e 'puts `ruby -e "puts(4)"`'


I think it failed because of the way command line arguments 
are parsed.  Interesting fact: command line parsing must be
be written by the programmer on VMS. i.e. expanding wild cards
is not automatically handled by the command line interpreter.
The quotes must not have been handled properly; I'll have to
look into this.

E.g. for ruby to handle

   ruby.exe script.rb *.c 

I had to implement processing of wild cards; Perl on VMS also
shares this fate.  I know Perl shares this fate because I based 
my command line parsing code on Perls. :/

Hopefully this hasn't been too convoluted.

Regards,
Brad