Ruby programming language

Ruby is an object-oriented interpreted programming language with clean syntax. It has its roots in Perl, Smalltalk, Python, Lisp and CLU, with Perl being the most important one.

Ruby language features:

• Intuitive syntax
• Basic object-oriented features
• Special object-oriented features:
  • mixins
  • singleton methods[?]
  • renaming[?]
  • object-specific classes[?]
  • etc.[?]
• Operator overloading
• Exception handling
• Iterators and Closures
• Perl regular expression support at syntax level
• Garbage collection
• Dynamic loading[?] (depending on the architecture)
• High portability (runs on Unix, Microsoft Windows, DOS, Mac OS X, OS/2, Amiga, and many more)
• Distributed under an open source licence (GPL or Artistic[?]).

Ruby is purely object-oriented: every bit of data is an object, even basic types. Every function is a method. This is similar to Smalltalk but unlike Java and Python. With a few exceptions, every name (variable) in a Ruby program holds a reference to an object, not the object itself.

The language was created by Yukihiro Matsumoto on February 24, 1993. The current stable version is 1.6.8. Note that the name isn't an acronym--it is actually a pun on Perl. According to the author, he designed Ruby to follow the principle of least surprise (POLS), meaning that the language should be free from the traps and inconsistencies that plague other languages.

Here is a sample of Ruby code:

   # Execute the following block of code 10 times
   10.times {
      string1 = "Hello world".gsub(" ", ",") # Replace ' ' with ', ' and store in  string1
      string1 += "!"                         # append "!" to variable 'string1'
      puts string1                           # print variable 'string1', followed by a newline
   }

More Ruby code is available in form of sample algorithm implementations in the articles:

• Binary search
• Exponentiating by squaring
• Linear search

External links

• Ruby home page (http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/)
• Ruby FAQ (http://www.rubycentral.com/faq/rubyfaqall.html)
• Ruby Garden (http://www.rubygarden.org/)