On Wed, Jan 14, 2004 at 05:20:49AM +0900, Tom Copeland wrote:
> > Before using Ruby as our project language it would be useful to know whether
> > Ruby has functions, libraries/headers (like C does) capable of handling the
> > foll. :
> > 
> > 1] open and close serial ports,
> > 2] set baud rates,
> > 3] check parity bit/byte,
> > 4] stop bits,
> > 5] Hardware handshaking,
> > 6] selection of port,......

http://ruby-serialport.rubyforge.org/

"Ruby/SerialPort is a Ruby's library that allows you to communicate via
the RS232 port.  It supports POSIX (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, AIX), Cygwin
and native Windows."

It does everything you need and provides a nice OO interface.

> > We saw that python has some routines for using existing C code so we dont have
> > to rewrite everything and can make modules containing functions and use it to
> > operate on files. Does Ruby have any such features. The documentation does not

It does. You can write extensions in C fairly easily (probably easier
than with Python since you don't have to maintain reference counts).
Moreover SWIG (http://www.swig.org/) is able to generate wrappers for
C/C++ libraries automatically.

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