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Charlie,

Your Strange Loop talk compared examples in Ruby, Duby, and Surinx. It was
interesting how the examples differed very little from each other. I wonder
if automated translation between the three would be possible? Perhaps the
only realistic direction would be from Duby/Surinx -> Ruby (e.g., removing
type information).

Also, have you documented the syntax differences somewhere, in case someone
wanted to do a manual translation?

dean


On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 5:19 PM, Charles Oliver Nutter
<headius / headius.com>wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 5:13 PM, Bill Kelly <billk / cts.com> wrote:
> > Wow!  That Fibonacci example on
> > http://kenai.com/projects/duby/pages/DubySamples
> > is really neat, especially the return value inferencing.
> > I would love it if ruby had something baked-in to the language that was
> > so unobtrusive, so much like writing regular ruby, but which could
> compile
> > to fast static code.
> >
> > I've wondered to what degree such a thing might be possible, but I
> > never realized it could really mirror regular ruby that closely.  Very
> cool.
>
> I'm very interested in adding optional static typing to JRuby, for
> people that need it. Duby is, in a way, research into how this can be
> done without damaging Ruby's syntax substantially. I think the
> trade-offs so far in Duby are acceptable.
>
> Granted, some people will want to lynch me for even suggesting the
> idea. But when you need static types, or the performance that can come
> more easily from static types, it's nice to have without dropping to C
> or Java. So it's worth exploring for Ruby, and JRuby is the Ruby I
> know how to hack.
>
> > Is your system able to compile floating point operations down to
> > primitives the way it does with fixnums?
>
> Yes, check the bench_fractal.duby benchmark in examples/. It's mostly
> the same code as the Ruby version, but runs almost two OOM faster.
> Heavy floating-point math.
>
> And I should make it clear....Duby is not a "statically typed Ruby".
> It's a different language that co-opts Ruby's syntax and adds static
> types and uses Java/JVM type system (though other backends are
> possible).
>
> - Charlie
>
>


-- 
Dean Wampler
coauthor of "Programming Scala" (O'Reilly)
-  http://programmingscala.com

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