On Fri, 9 Feb 2001, Robert Feldt wrote:

> Yeah, you're right. Sorry for wasting bandwith. I saw this in someone
> else's code and thought it was a new way to specify here docs. I now see
> that there is a small difference. When using double quotes you get an
> extra newline before the first line.

If the code you saw it in was mine, I can explain the rationale - I use a
modified Python mode for syntax highlighting in SciTE, and although it
doesn't know about here documents (or even multiline doublequoted
strings), it'll do the right thing if you add the (irrelevant to ruby) 
extra quotation marks...

Avi