so ruby 1.8 has been out for a little while, and i knew it had a bunch of cool new features, but i hadn't had a chance to look that closely at them.
fortunately, whytheluckystiff, the guy who wrote the YAML support for ruby, has put together a little document that details exactly what some of the new features are.
in addition to the new YAML support, i'm particularly excited to see the XML parser in the core library, the dynamic library support (sort of like their version of .NET's support for calling into unmanaged code), and the un module (as in -run), which implements common unix commands like cp, ln, mv, and quite a few others in ruby, so you can safely use them in cross platform makefiles or .bat/.sh scripts.
anyway, suffice it to say that i'm going to be trying real hard to find a use for all these new toys just as soon as i can.
