A new development version of Ruby (1.9.0) was released last week. Currently this release is not intended for production use. There are incompatibilities with 1.8.x series and 1.9.0 is more of a stepping stone for the upcoming 2.0 release.

So what is new in Ruby 1.9.0? Here is a summary,

• Block arguments are local now. This can break existing code.
• Introduced a new class called BasicObject.
• Kernel and Module packages extended.
• Regular expression engine upgraded.
• Native threading support.
• Offers literal hash syntax for parameters. :action = “helloworld” becomes action: “helloworld”.
• And many more….

It is important to learn these as the next stable version 2.0 will look very much similar to 1.9.0.