Jruby newbie question

[bryan lim]

hi all,

i read that jruby is a Java implementation of the Ruby interpreter.

what is an interpreter? is it like a ide?

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

An interpreter is a program which reads code in some computer language and immediately executes it. Some languages, like Java, are "compiled" into a special format (class files, in Java's case) before being executed, while other languages, like Ruby, are interpreted, with no intermediate format. jruby is a Java program you can just run from the command line to execute your Ruby code.

An IDE for Ruby will generally include an interpreter so you can execute the code you're working on; but an IDE is something different altogether from an interpreter.

[bryan lim]

thank you for your reply.

so ruby does not need to be compiled?

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

No, it does not. You can run the Ruby (or JRuby) interpreter interactively, and type in a line of code and see it executed immediately. Of course, you can also save your code in one or more files and run it all at once.

[bryan lim]

i see. learn something new again.

thank you!