Cedric Beust e-mailed me to let me know that the piece of the Ruby source that jshell linked to is a 3000 line C file without comments. I didn't look at the code before I posted. I was just passing along what was in jshell's post. I should point out that jshell was contrasting the Ruby and Python source for equivalent functionality (strings). It would have been nice if there had been more commentary on why the jshell found the Ruby source preferable to the Python source. Both are long, and the Python source has more comments. The Python source also has a ton of Unicode related #ifdef's and some interstitial C macros.