Ruby Under a Microscope

Chapter 1. Tokenization and Parsing

Your code has a long road to take before Ruby ever runs it.

How many times do you think Ruby reads and transforms your code before running it? Once? Twice?

The correct answer is three times. Whenever you run a Ruby script—whether it’s a large Rails application, a simple Sinatra website, or a background worker job—Ruby rips your code apart into small pieces and then puts them back together in a different format three times! Between the time you type ruby and the time you start to see actual output on the console, your Ruby code has a long road to take—a journey involving a variety of different technologies, techniques, ...