Category: Faqs

People commonly annotate Ruby code by showing the results of executing each statement as a comment attached to that statement. For example, in the following code, we show that the assignment generates the string “Billy Bob”, and then the result of extracting some substrings. Emacs and vim users can integrate this with their editing environments,…

Officially, the language is called “Ruby”. On most systems, it is invoked using the command ruby. It’s OK to use “ruby” instead of “Ruby”. Please don’t use “RUBY” as the language name. Originally, or historically, it was called “ruby”.

This section or parts of it might be out-dated or in need of confirmation. For some of the Ruby mailing lists, the mailing list software adds a prefix to the subject lines, for example ruby-core:1234. This can confuse the threading in some mail user agents. In mutt, you can get threading to work using the following…

There are several mailing lists talking about Ruby. See the Mailing Lists page for more information. You can search the mailing list archives using https://ml.ruby-lang.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/. (This is the URL for the ruby-talk list, munge as required for the others).

The official Ruby Home Page is www.ruby-lang.org. Besides the English and Japanese versions, there exist translations into various other languages. Good starting points for finding Ruby information are the Documentation and Community pages.

The following is a summary of a posting made by Matz in [ruby-talk:00382] on June 4, 1999. (The birthday of Ruby has been corrected in [ruby-list:15977].) Well, Ruby was born on February 24, 1993. I was talking with my colleague about the possibility of an object-oriented scripting language. I knew Perl (Perl4, not Perl5), but I didn’t like…

Influenced by Perl, Matz wanted to use a jewel name for his new language, so he named Ruby after a colleague’s birthstone. Later, he realized that Ruby comes right after Perl in several situations. In birthstones, pearl is June, ruby is July. When measuring font sizes, pearl is 5pt, ruby is 5.5pt. He thought Ruby…

Ruby is a simple and powerful object-oriented programming language, created by Yukihiro Matsumoto (who goes by the handle “Matz” in this document and on the mailing lists). Like Perl, Ruby is good at text processing. Like Smalltalk, everything in Ruby is an object, and Ruby has blocks, iterators, meta-classes and other good stuff. You can…