[ruby-talk:8368] Something like Perl's Inline module for Ruby?

I recently discovered Perl's Inline module.  It allows you to insert code
written in a different language into your perl code - if it's a compiled
language (like C) the Inline module takes care of compiling and linking it
and then runs it (The first time. It can skip comiling and linking in
subsequent runs of the script - pretty cool).  It also apparently handles 
interpreted languages as they have a flavor that lets you insert Python 
code into your perl code.  This seems to be a pretty nifty feature.

I sent an email to the author of Inline.pm to ask if he could create a
flavor for Ruby (to allow the insertion of Ruby code into a perl script)
and he replied that he was just looking into Ruby and was very
enthusiastic about the language so far.  And in fact he is planning to do
the next flavor of Inline for Ruby! (Inline::Ruby).  He raised an
interesting point: It would actually be much more useful to have a way to
inline perl code in your Ruby scripts - that way you could call your
legacy perl code from Ruby.  Is there any facility for doing this now?  Is
this kind of what the Perl.pm module does 
(see: http://www.yoshidam.net/Ruby.html )?

Phil