More archeolinguistics: unearthing proto-Ruby

Computational archeolinguistics are the new rave. I've been working in a couple archeological sites of major interest, which, albeit well known, still have lots of new ground to be explored.

Latest findings

This is the first (?) public Ruby release dating from Dec 21 1995. If you can read Japanese, you can have a look at the original release announcement posted on the Japanese newsgroups, and here's the tarball: ruby-0.95.tar.gz

matz just released ruby 0.49

Early tutorials

matz wrote a number of tutorials for Ruby 0.95/0.96. One of the pearls you can find there is the first(?) REPL for Ruby:

line = ''
print "ruby> "
while TRUE
  l = gets
  if l
    line = line + l 
    continue if l =~ /,\s*$/
  end
  begin
    print eval(line).inspect, "\n"
  rescue
    $! = 'exception raised' if not $!
    print "ERR: ", $!, "\n"
  end
  break if not l
  line = ''
  print "ruby> "
end

The introduction was followed by a series of tutorials (also authored by matz):

• intro
• ruby's features
• simple scripts
• strings
• regular expressions
• arrays and associate arrays (hashes)
• simple scripts
• control structures
• iterators
• object-orientation
• methods