Hi,

From: "Jason Watkins" <jason_watkins / pobox.com>
>
> Just out of curiousity, how often do you find yourself:
> 
> 1.) Write ruby in the interactive interpreter
> 2.) Write ruby in files, occasionally calling the interpreter from a shell
>     to test your code

I'm a huge fan of irb.  I primarily seem to do 2. but perhaps
more than occasionally.  I tend to keep an irb window open at
all times and frequently try out ideas while writing ruby code
in a file.  I'll do 1. occasionally; I think it's been quick hacks
like some one-off processing of a file that I could just do from
irb and not bother typing into a source file (but more complex 
than I wanted to do with -e).

I also on occasion have done a variation of 2. which is to start
IRB at the bottom of my main source file ala:

require 'IRB'
IRB.start

so I can interactively try out objects defined in my main
program....  (I think I've tended to use this variation only
when I haven't had automated unit tests.)


Regards,

Bill