Re: [Rubydotnet-developer] Undergrad project

[Rodrigo B. de O. <rb...@ac...>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ron Jeffries" <ron...@ac...>
> ...
> ...
>   What does a person using Ruby with .NET really want and need?
>

Pretty much what you've already said, Ron, I'm just throwing one more
vote: being able to consume and produce cli components with ruby like syntax
and semantics.

The syntactic part is somewhat easy but implementing the full ruby semantics
in a way that still allows one to write .net consumable classes seems a bit
hard.

The approach I have used in boo (http://boo.codehaus.org/) was to drop the
hard-to-mix-with-cli semantics in favor of a more tight integration with
the type system. The type inference mechanism (still maturing) gives one
the scripting feeling of a lighter syntax although most of the dynamic
semantics are lost:

    import System.IO

    for line in File.OpenText("albatros.txt"):
        print(line) if line =~ /^Man/


While I'm pretty much happy with that I don't think most rubysts and
pythonists
for that matter are willing to give up the truly dynamic nature of their
programming languages.

Regards,
Rodrigo