Hi Larry!  Thanks for the introduction and welcome!
Perl was my favorite language for over a decade, with C and then later C++ being
the languages I developed in for runtime speed and for work requirements.

About three years ago I ran across an article in Dr. Dobb's Journal that immediately
hooked me on Ruby, and I have not turned back to Perl since that time.

Using SWIG (http://www.swig.org/), I have developed runtime-critical algorithms in
C++ and SWIG'd the interface so that I can totally access and control them from Ruby.

And just this last month, I have come across a compiled language that I believe will
completely replace C and C++ for me: The D Language (http://www.digitalmars.com/d/).
It even has a SWIG module for it so that I can easily access D from Ruby!

Now if I could only get our programmers at work to all switch from Perl and Tcl to Ruby
and from C++ to D !!!

-- Glenn

Larry Felton Johnson wrote:
> This is just a note introducing myself to the list, and
> explaining what I hope to get from the list.
> 
> I'm a software systems engineer at Georgia State University.
> That basically translates to Unix Systems Administrator, though
> my specialty is programming systems utilities.  We run Solaris.
> 
> Most of my scripts are written in perl, I have one pretty large
> scale project I wrote and maintain in php, and for the forseeable
> future I'll probably still be primarily working in perl (most of
> the people in our group know at least a little perl, so if I'm
> not available the code is not inaccessable to my workgroup).
> 
> About a year ago I began looking at ruby, really liked it.  It seemed
> clean, easy to read, and had all the usual capabilities which attracted
> me to perl to begin with.  I didn't pursue it at the time because perl 
> was adequate for my needs.  About two weeks ago I started dabbling in ruby
> again, and have decided to write those utilities not likely to be 
> maintained by anyone else (in other words scripts for my own use)
> in ruby so I'll get a more rounded experience in the language.
> 
> The typical script I'll be writing is the usual administrators utility
> where one opens a file (including program output in that category) loops
> through the file a line at a time doing regex matches, and does appropriate
> stuff based on those matches.
> 
> I look forward to browsing this list and asking questions from time to
> time.  ruby strikes me as a very good scripting language.
> 
> Larry 
> 
>