Austin Ziegler
11/21/2003 5:43:00 AM
On Fri, 21 Nov 2003 10:30:06 +0900, Sean O'Dell wrote:
> On Thursday 20 November 2003 05:24 pm, Austin Ziegler wrote:
>> On Fri, 21 Nov 2003 09:54:08 +0900, Sean O'Dell wrote:
>>> It looks like too much happens at run-time, always checking and
>>> querying for certain methods, etc. Also, the concept of a whole
>>> interface, rather than querying for a set of required methods, I
>>> always think is easier to grasp.
>> For all intents and purposes, there is no such thing as "compile-
>> time" in Ruby. Yes, Ruby does go through an AST parser, but
>> compile-time optimizations won't work in Ruby because any method
>> can be redefined. At any time, and this invokes compile-time
>> again.
> I know, but for my purposes, I think of the point in which the
> bulk of a main class is loaded as the compile-time. I don't know
> of another term I can use to refer to this ramping-up period.
> It would have nice, instead of hearing that I was using the wrong
> term, you had offered a more correct term.
"Initialization"? "Interpretation"? I don't think that there is a
good term for it (class definitions are execution of Ruby code), but
it's rather irrelevant anyway, as the eval'ing of strings or meta
programming would probably move your checking costs to
"near-runtime" in any case for large-scale applications.
-austin
--
austin ziegler * austin@halostatue.ca * Toronto, ON, Canada
software designer * pragmatic programmer * 2003.11.21
* 00.39.22