Ruby programming language

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 one.

Ruby language features:

• Obvious syntax
• Basic object-oriented features
• Special object-oriented features (mix-ins, singleton methods, renaming, 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, OSX, OS/2, Amiga, and many more)
• Distributed under an open source license (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.

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.

Sample Ruby code:

string = "Hello world"                     # assign "Hello world" string to variable 'string'
another_string = string.gsub(" ", ", ")    # substritute all " " to ", " in variable 'string' and put result into variable 'another_string'
another_string += "!\n"                    # append "!\n" ("\n" is newline character) to variable 'another_string'
print another_string                       # print variable 'another_string'

More Ruby code is available in form of sample algorithm implementations in 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

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