> How do you "add" anything to the language by taking things away?  And what
> potential does any language have without File IO?  This seems like a step
> towards an academic ideal, which is therefore almost guaranteed to be
*not*
> a useful tool!  (Although I saw something written about embedding...sounds
> interesting.)

Well, it would be very useful to me. :-)

If we were talking about a reduced version of Perl then I'd agree - Perl as
a language seems to me like a typeless version of C with a lot of utility
built in.

However, I think Ruby has a very strong and appealing language core that
could be used outside of orthodox scripting.  Embedding for example.  For a
lot of reasons that just wouldn't be possible with Ruby at the moment
because of all the extra utility.

--
Justin Johnson

"Gavin Sinclair" <gsinclair / soyabean.com.au> wrote in message
news:004801c238a8$4b406dd0$062386cb / nosedog...
> I just joined the mailing list, having but read it through the web for
> several weeks.  I was prompted by reading the following:
>
> <quote author="Justin Johnson">
> That is a very good question.  I think Matz's implementation is Ruby with
> lots of practical and script-useful add-ons.  It's an incredibly pragmatic
> tool.  A lot of this is owed to the language concepts.
>
> Point is, because there's only one implementation, there isn't an
> official(?) language standard yet.  Ruby is not an academic ideal, it's a
> tangible tool.
>
> I'm hoping to implement a pure language version. No perlisms, no FileIO,
no
> SAFE, no threads, just classes, modules, arrays, strings...enough for the
> language itself to be complete.
>
> I think the language has more potential than just competing with
> Perl/Python.
> </quote>
>
>
> How do you "add" anything to the language by taking things away?  And what
> potential does any language have without File IO?  This seems like a step
> towards an academic ideal, which is therefore almost guaranteed to be
*not*
> a useful tool!  (Although I saw something written about embedding...sounds
> interesting.)
>
> Also, I strongly believe Ruby needs its "Perl" features.  I learned Ruby
> because Perl was frustrating me.  I didn't learn it for the fun of it (cos
I
> didn't know it would be fun) - I learned it because I knew I would be able
> to do so and complete my task in one day.  And that's only because it's so
> easy to port Perl to Ruby.  Now I'll never use Perl again - even though I
> love it.
>
> I'm sure I'm not alone there.
>
> Sorry for this unorthodox way of chiming in.  It, er, won't happen again.
>
> Cheers,
> Gavin
>