----- Original Message -----
From: "Justin Johnson" <justinj / mobiusent.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ruby
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk / ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Friday, August 02, 2002 4:53 AM
Subject: Re: Late contribution to discussions


> 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.

Actually, one place this might be useful is
on the Palm OS. This has been discussed a lot,
but no one seems able/willing or has time to
make it happen.

Someone said Ruby would be good for embedding
if it could be squeezed under 32K. My uninformed
opinion is that this will never happen, even
with a recursive-descent parser hand-optimized
in assembly language. I recall well my Turbo
Pascal 3.0 from 1985 -- Borland was notorious
for this kind of optimizing back then, when a
floppy disk was 360K and 128K was a *lot* of
RAM. The compiler then was 38K, and I'll bet
they couldn't have reduced it much farther.
And Ruby is more complex than Pascal.

Hal