On Apr 8, 2005 12:45 AM, Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz / ruby-lang.org> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> In message "Re: Seven new VMs, all in a row"
>     on Fri, 8 Apr 2005 13:19:41 +0900, ptkwt / aracnet.com (Phil Tomson) writes:
> 
> |Please, prove my skepticism to be wrong.  A Ruby that was 30x faster (on
> |the same hardware) would be great.  As I said in the other post
> |responding to Avi, if it's possible to speed things up that much with a
> |SmallTalk VM, maybe we should be studying said VM to figure out how to
> |make it happen in YARV (since matz has recently said that YARV is the
> |future VM for Ruby).
> 
> It's not impossible to make Ruby run 30x faster for some tasks, for
> example, YARV runs more than 100x faster in some small benchmarks.
> But I'm not sure if it's possible to make it 30x faster in average.

Yes, and my point is that there's a fine line between "I'm not sure if
it's possible" and "I doubt it's possible".  One challenges, the other
discourages.  Btw, I admire that you're not sure, and if you aren't
sure, how can anyone else be sure until it's tried?

Not knowing if it's possible, if Peter wants to try, we should
encourage it.  If he's right, and we're wrong, and we convince him not
to try, we all lose.  If he's wrong, what has he wasted but his own
time?  He's not on my payroll, so try he should!  If he were on my
payroll, I might think differently ;-)
 
Here's the way I see it, in Ruby...

class Person
  def initialize
    srand Time.now.to_i
    @wants = (rand(24) + 64).chr
  end

  # what a person wants is (somewhat) read only, and fairly random.
  def wants
    "Wants: " + @wants
  end

  # what a person works on is usually the same as what they want.
  def works_on
    "Works on: " + @wants
  end
end

p = Person.new
puts p.wants
puts p.works_on

p.wants = "Z"

-- 
Bill Guindon (aka aGorilla)