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.

Its most articulate advocates write such descriptions as, "... it has a couple of real killer features;
in particular the way blocks and the pervasive use of the visitor
pattern come together change the way one writes programs for
the better."

There is a Ruby/Tk if you want to bring your [Tk] skills into a new world:

  require 'tk'
  root = TkRoot.new() { title "Hello, world!" }
  Tk.mainloop()

(from http://httpd.chello.nl/k.vangelder/ruby/learntk/ )
More on Ruby/Tk
(for [MacOS]!) appears in the "Ruby/Tk Primer:  Creating a ''cron'' GUI 
Interface with Ruby/Tk"
[http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/06/25/ruby_pt1.html].
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 What: Ruby
 Where: http://www.ruby-lang.org/ 
        http://www.rubycentral.com/book/ext_tk.html 
 Description: Programming language for quick and easy programming.
        A clean, consistent language design where everything is an object,
        CLU style iterators, singleton classes/methods, and
        lexical closures.  Makes use of Tk (with bindings similar in
        concept to Perl/Tk) for its GUI support.
        Currently at version 1.8.0 .
 Updated: 08/2003
 Contact: mailto:webmaster@ruby-lang.org 

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See http://www.rubycentral.com/book/ext_tk.html for more information.

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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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See http://www.approximity.com/ruby/Comparison_rb_st_m_java.html for one comparison of Ruby to
[C++],
[CLOS],
[Dylan],
[Java],
[Objective C],
[Perl],
[PHP],
[Python],
[Smalltalk],


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[Category Language]