Ruby is an object-oriented interpreted programming language with clean syntax.
It has its roots in Perl, Smalltalk, Python and LISP, with Perl being the most important root.
Ruby language features:
- Obvious syntax
- Basic object-oriented features
- Special object-oriented features (mix-ins, singleton methods, renaming, etc.)
- Perl regular expression support at syntax level
- Dynamic loading (depending on the architecture)
- High portability (runs on Unix, Microsoft Windows, DOS, OSX, OS/2, Amiga, and many more)
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.
The language was created by Yukihiro Matsumoto on February 24, 1993. The current stable version is 1.6.5 (25-09-2001). Note that the name is not an acronym--it is actually a pun on Perl.
See Ruby home page, Ruby FAQ
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