From the FAQ[http://www.rubycentral.com/faq/rubyfaq.html]:

``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 use Ruby to write servers, experiment with prototypes, and for everyday programming tasks. As a fully-integrated object-oriented language, Ruby scales well.''

The home page for Ruby is http://www.ruby-lang.org.  You may also find http://www.rubycentral.com and http://www.ale.cx/mine/ good sources of Ruby information.

There is a Ruby/Tk[http://www.ale.cx/mine/raa/raa-history-Application_GUI.html] if you want to bring your [Tk] skills into a new world.
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access to the server www.ale.cx has been restricted. ''';^('''
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[RS]: Like [Scheme], Ruby has arbitrary-size integers as default - another hint that Tcl should have it too... [Octet-packed integers] come to mind..

[AK]:
I consider the [Octet-packed integers] more something of a file-format, and less of an in-memory format.
Note aside: In [Slim Binaries] I refer to the paper about ''Universal Symbol Files''. This paper
advances the notion of octet-packed integers to, albeit slightly differently than metakit if I read the
code right. - [RS]: Well, a very simple alternative would be to just keep the string rep and let [expr] work on that if it runs into a "integer value too large to represent".

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[Category Language]