Hi all,

I'm a relatively new Ruby programmer, I am curious as to what Ruby is
trying to achieve that other scripting languages do not already offer (Apart
from the syntactic differences of yet another scripting language, that is).
The reason I ask is that it must offer something that is worth a lot considering
it runs twice as slowly as Perl (see below).

I was also interested in comparing the performance of Ruby against something
like Perl, and (although this test is VERY simple) thought that I'd benchmark
a simple counter in both Ruby and Perl. The number that it counts to
is arbitrary,
I started with 4294967296 and kept reducing it because I got bored of waiting).
Code is provided below.

Any way, on a 3Ghz P4 CPU, I got the following results:

Perl:
real    0m24.569s
user    0m24.499s
sys     0m0.068s

Ruby:
real    0m57.218s
user    0m57.108s
sys     0m0.109s

(Just out of interest I did it in C as well):

(Average Run, non-optimised)
real    0m0.142s
user    0m0.136s
sys     0m0.005s

(Average Run, -O3 optimisations):
real    0m0.074s
user    0m0.070s
sys     0m0.004s

##################################

#!/usr/bin/perl
my $num = 0;

while ($num < 94967295)
{
    $num += 1;
}

###############

#!/usr/bin/ruby
num = 0

while num < 94967295 do
    num += 1
end

###############

int main()
{
    int counter = 0;

    while (counter < 94967295)
    {
        counter += 1;
    }
}