From: "John W. Long" <ng@...>
Date: 2004-01-30T12:55:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and Perl Integration

----Lothar Scholz wrote:----
> JWL> and then use the perl code in a rubyish way.
>
> And this is a logical mistake. Even if Perl is near Ruby in a few ways
> (i think this is not so much). A rubyish way can never be generated
automatically
> from Perl. The only way is to automatically generate function wrappers.

My ignorance shows here. I'm not a perl coder. I don't know how easy it
would be to integrate the two. But even if there was just a simple:

Perl::eval %{
    use MyModule;
    ...
    my $m = MyModule->new;
    $m->func;
}

Where eval would return some sort of object wraping the result of func it
seems like you could write small ruby libraries that would leverage the
support of much larger perl libraries. Even if it were ugly, ugliness can be
hidden withing small Ruby classes.

I've seen several Ruby projects that are merely ports of Perl Libraries. It
seems like this process might be made easier if you could write a Ruby
wrapper for an existing Perl library and then gradually rewrite the code in
Ruby as you have the time. Perl integration with Ruby would also make it
easier for people to port their existing Perl applications to Ruby.

--
John