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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