On May 30, 10:10 ¨Âí¬ æïòçïôôåî÷éúáò¼ðèòåøéáîòåá®®®Àèõóèíáéì®ãïíwrote: > On 00:53 Fri 30 May , Marc Heiler wrote: > > > What you should also keep in mind is that if you already > > know Ruby well, learning C can be boring, because 95% of > > what C does, Ruby does too - shorter and nicer for the > > human being. > > That goes for any OOP language. Procedural languages like C require more > code to do the more complex task, but generally require less to do > simple things (getchar/scanf vs. messing with an array). You did say "generally". But since we're talking about Ruby in this thread and since you're responding to someone who was specifically comparing Ruby and C, I think it's worth pointing out that Ruby, and perhaps object-oriented scripting languages in general, are almost always shorter than C, even for those "simple things". Since you gave "getchar/scanf vs. messing with an array" as an example... C: ==== #include <stdio.h> int main() { printf("How old are you? "); int age; scanf("%d", &age); printf("Next year you will be %d.\n", age + 1); } Java: ==== import java.io.*; public class AgeQuestion { public static void main(String[] arguments) throws IOException { System.out.print("How old are you? "); BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in)); String age_string; age_string = input.readLine(); int age = Integer.parseInt(age_string); System.out.println("Next year you will be " + (age + 1) + "."); } } Ruby: ==== print "How old are you? " age = gets.to_i puts "Next year you will be #{age + 1}." ==== So yes, Java is more verbose than C. But C is more verbose than Ruby. Eric ==== LearnRuby.com offers Rails & Ruby HANDS-ON public & ON-SITE workshops. Ruby Fundamentals Wkshp June 16-18 Ann Arbor, Mich. Ready for Rails Ruby Wkshp June 23-24 Ann Arbor, Mich. Ruby on Rails Wkshp June 25-27 Ann Arbor, Mich. Ruby Plus Rails Combo Wkshp June 23-27 Ann Arbor, Mich Please visit http://LearnRuby.com for all the details.