What is the meaning of the following words – Ruby, ruby and RUBY. Do all these words mean the same or there is any difference? This is one of those quirky interview questions which make you run to the Chapter 1 of your Ruby book.
Let us look at each of these one by one.
1. Ruby – The word “Ruby” (with a capital R) refers to the Ruby programming language. When you say “I am learning Ruby,” it is to the Ruby language that you refer to. It is the same when you say “This application is built in Ruby.”
2. ruby – The word “ruby” (with a small r) refers to the ruby interpreter, the computer program that reads and executes programs written in Ruby language. It is what you invoke when you type “ruby myprogram.rb” on the command line to execute your code.
3. RUBY – So what does “RUBY” stand for? Actually it does not mean anything. Capital letters are generally acronyms for a longer text but in this case the word “RUBY” does not represent anything. In fact, it is wrong to use “RUBY” to refer to either the “Ruby” programming language or the “ruby” interpreter.
So, don’t be confused by these words in the future and try to use them correctly.


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