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Yet another update to the list of changes in Ruby 1.9, covering new stuff between Oct. 06 and Jan. 07.

There are two major events which you won't find in that list (since they don't affect the language itself) but deserve nonetheless a mention. In Dec. 06 Koichi Sasada migrated Ruby's source repository to Subversion, paving the way for the merge of YARV*1 with Ruby 1.9. matz is now also working on a separate branch (matzruby), with more experimental features.

These are the most relevant language/core modifications during the covered period of time:

Symbol

It isn't a subclass of String anymore. This experiment lived exactly for two months (Sep. 2nd to Nov. 2nd).

Method#receiver, #name and #owner

Returns the receiver of a Method object, the name and the class or module where it was defined, respectively.

class A; def foo; end end
a = A.new
a.method(:foo).receiver                # => #<A:0xa7d3c938>
a.method(:foo).owner                   # => A
a.method(:foo).name                    # => "foo"

Line length limit in IO operations

IO operations that read a line accept an argument to specify the maximum amount of data to be read.

The affected methods are IO#gets, IO#readline, IO#readlines, IO#each_line, IO#lines, IO.foreach, IO.readlines, StringIO#gets, StringIO#readline, String IO#each and StringIO#readlines.

The limit is specified either as the (optional) second argument, or by passing a single integer argument (i.e. the first argument is interpreted as the limit if it's an integer, as a line separator otherwise)

IO#lines and IO#bytes

These new methods behave like String#lines and #bytes (also new in 1.9), returning an enumerator.

String#unpack with a block

If given a block, String#unpack will call it with the unpacked values instead of creating an array.

RUBY_VERSION                                      # => "1.9.0"
RUBY_RELEASE_DATE                                 # => "2007-02-07"
s = (0..4).to_a.pack("V*")
a = []
s.unpack("V*"){|x| a << x}
a                                                 # => [0, 1, 2, 3, 4]

String#lines

String#lines accepts an extra argument to indicate the line separator.

If given a block, #lines behaves like #each_line (ruby-core:9218).

Object#tap