[ruby-talk:03344] Re: Selling Rubies by the Carat

> it? What one word completes the sentence "Ruby is a ________
> [programming] language"? This doesn't have to be an existing term:
> just a hook on which to hand a description.
> Thanks in advance for your imaginative answers!


for a start... a little technical, but I'm trying to avoid the S-word.


Imperative:

In Ruby, programs are made of statements accessing and modifying the state
of variables, executed in a well-defined order. Most popular programming
languages are like that.

Object-based:

In Ruby, most operations are made in the context of an object. All values,
containers, procedures, classes are objects. Anything referenced by a
variable is an object. Thus Ruby is closer to SmallTalk than to Java or
Python.

Dynamic:

It has runtime procedure call dispatching (inheritance polymorphism),
runtime definition of new procedures, classes and modules, and runtime
parsing.  Variables may hold objects of any class (Weak typing). It
offers mark and sweep garbage collection so that there is no need to free
memory explicitly (even with reference loops).

...

that's it for now... probably full of errors and imprecisions. =)



Mathieu Bouchard