Introduction

• Ruby was created by Yukihiro Matsumoto (aka Matz) in 1994
  • He liked Perl's text processing abilities
  • He didn't think Python was OO enough (not to the level of SmallTalk)
  • Ruby is sort of a cross between SmallTalk and Perl
• Features (from the FAQ)
  • Simple syntax,
  • Basic OO features (classes, methods, objects, and so on),
  • Special OO features (Mix-ins, singleton methods, renaming, ...),
  • Operator overloading,
  • Exception handling,
  • Iterators and closures,
  • Garbage collection,
  • Multi-platform (runs on various Unices, Windows, DOS, OSX, OS/2 and so on)