Ruby & Sapphire

Ruby is a reflective, dynamic, object-oriented programming language. It combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like object-oriented features, and also shares some features with Python, Lisp, Dylan and CLU. Ruby is a single-pass interpreted language. more...

Home
Building Toys
Classic Toys
Educational
Electronic, Battery, Wind-Up
Model RR, Trains
Models, Kits
Outdoor Toys, Structures
Pretend Play, Preschool
Puzzles
Radio Control
Robots, Monsters, Space Toys
Stuffed Animals
TV, Movie, Character Toys
Alf
Arthur
Barney
Batman
Bear in the Big Blue House
BeyBlade
Big Comfy Couch
Blues Clues
Bob the Builder
Caillou
California Raisins
Clifford the Big Red Dog
Curious George
Digimon
Disney
Dora the Explorer
Dr. Seuss
Dragon Tales
DragonBall Z
Dukes of Hazzard
ET Extra Terrestrial
Fairly Odd Parents
Family Guy
Flintstones
Futurama
Garfield
Gumby
Hamtaro
Harry Potter
Hello Kitty
Howdy Doody
Invader Zim
Jay Jay the Jet Plane
Jimmy Neutron
Lamb Chop, Shari Lewis
Land Before Time
Lost in Space
Maisy
Munsters
Muppets, Sesame Street
My Little Pony
My Melody, Miffy
Noddy
Other
Peanuts Gang
Pee-Wee Herman
Pokemon
Action Figures
Electronic Games
Other
Plush
Trading Cards
Aquapolis
Base
Boxes
Crystal Guardians
Delta Species
Deoxys
Dragon
Ex Emerald
eX Unseen Forces
Expedition
Fire Red Leaf Green
Hidden Legends
Holon Phantoms
Japanese
Jungle
Legend Maker
Legendary
Mixed Lots
Neo Destiny
Neo Revelation
Other
Packs
Promotional Cards
Ruby & Sapphire
Sandstorm
Singles
Skyridge
Team Aqua/Team Magma
Team Rocket Returns
Popeye
Popples
Powerpuff Girls
Rocky & Bullwinkle
Rudolph
Rugrats
Scooby-Doo
Simpsons
Smurfs
South Park
Speed Racer
Spider-Man
Spirit
SpongeBob Squarepants
Strawberry Shortcake
Teletubbies
Theodore Tugboat
Thomas the Tank Engine
Three Stooges
Veggie Tales
Warner Bros.
Wiggles
Winnie the Pooh
Toy Soldiers
Vintage, Antique Toys

Its main implementation is free software distributed under an open-source license.

History

The language was created by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, who started working on Ruby on February 24, 1993, and released it to the public in 1995. "Ruby" was named after a colleague's birthstone. As of October 2006, the latest stable version is 1.8.5. Ruby 1.9 (with some major changes) is also in development. There are inherent performance problems with the current Ruby implementation, leading to the development of several virtual machines for Ruby. These include JRuby, an attempt to port Ruby to the Java platform, and Rubinius, an interpreter modelled after self-hosting Smalltalk virtual machines. The main developers have thrown their weight behind the virtual machine provided by the YARV project, which was merged into the Ruby source tree on 31 December 2006, and will be released as Ruby 2.0.

Philosophy

Matz's primary design consideration is to make programmers happy by reducing the menial work they must do, following the principles of good user interface design. He stresses that systems design needs to emphasize human, rather than computer, needs :

Ruby is said to follow the principle of least surprise (POLS), meaning that the language typically behaves intuitively or as the programmer assumes it should. The phrase did not originate with Matz and, generally speaking, Ruby may more closely follow a paradigm best termed as "Matz's Least Surprise", though many programmers have found it to be close to their own mental model as well.

Matz defined it this way in an interview:

Semantics

Ruby is object-oriented: every bit of data is an object, even classes and types that many other languages designate as primitives (such as integers, booleans, and "nil"). Every function is a method. Named values (variables) always designate references to objects, not the objects themselves. Ruby supports inheritance with dynamic dispatch, mixins and singleton methods (belonging to, and defined for, a single instance rather than being defined on the class). Though Ruby does not support multiple inheritance, classes can import modules as mixins. Procedural syntax is supported, but all methods defined outside of the scope of a particular object are actually methods of the Object class. Since this class is parent to every other class, the changes become visible to all classes and objects.

Read more at Wikipedia.org