Hi all, I'm a relatively new Ruby programmer, I am curious as to what Ruby is trying to achieve that other scripting languages do not already offer (Apart from the syntactic differences of yet another scripting language, that is). The reason I ask is that it must offer something that is worth a lot considering it runs twice as slowly as Perl (see below). I was also interested in comparing the performance of Ruby against something like Perl, and (although this test is VERY simple) thought that I'd benchmark a simple counter in both Ruby and Perl. The number that it counts to is arbitrary, I started with 4294967296 and kept reducing it because I got bored of waiting). Code is provided below. Any way, on a 3Ghz P4 CPU, I got the following results: Perl: real 0m24.569s user 0m24.499s sys 0m0.068s Ruby: real 0m57.218s user 0m57.108s sys 0m0.109s (Just out of interest I did it in C as well): (Average Run, non-optimised) real 0m0.142s user 0m0.136s sys 0m0.005s (Average Run, -O3 optimisations): real 0m0.074s user 0m0.070s sys 0m0.004s ################################## #!/usr/bin/perl my $num = 0; while ($num < 94967295) { $num += 1; } ############### #!/usr/bin/ruby num = 0 while num < 94967295 do num += 1 end ############### int main() { int counter = 0; while (counter < 94967295) { counter += 1; } }