Ruby (programming Language) - Features

Features

  • Thoroughly object-oriented with inheritance, mixins and metaclasses
  • Dynamic typing and duck typing
  • Everything is an expression (even statements) and everything is executed imperatively (even declarations)
  • Succinct and flexible syntax that minimizes syntactic noise and serves as a foundation for domain-specific languages
  • Dynamic reflection and alteration of objects to facilitate metaprogramming
  • Lexical closures, iterators and generators, with a unique block syntax
  • Literal notation for arrays, hashes, regular expressions and symbols
  • Embedding code in strings (interpolation)
  • Default arguments
  • Four levels of variable scope (global, class, instance, and local) denoted by sigils or the lack thereof
  • Garbage collection
  • First-class continuations
  • Strict boolean coercion rules (everything is true except false and nil)
  • Exception handling
  • Operator overloading
  • Built-in support for rational numbers, complex numbers and arbitrary-precision arithmetic
  • Custom dispatch behavior (through method_missing and const_missing)
  • Native threads and cooperative fibers
  • Initial support for Unicode and multiple character encodings (still buggy as of version 1.9)
  • Native plug-in API in C
  • Interactive Ruby Shell (a REPL)
  • Centralized package management through RubyGems
  • Implemented on all major platforms
  • Large standard library

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Famous quotes containing the word features:

    “Each reader discovers for himself that, with respect to the simpler features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy his similes.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    ““It looks as if
    Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
    And its eyes shut with overeagerness
    To see what people found so interesting
    In one another, and had gone to sleep
    Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
    Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
    Short off, and died against the windowpane.””
    —Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    “It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times—the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie—seem attractive by comparison.”
    —Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)