On Aug 20, 2007, at 4:29 PM, Gary Wright wrote:

>
> On Aug 20, 2007, at 5:12 PM, Hassan Schroeder wrote:
>
>> On 8/20/07, John Joyce <dangerwillrobinsondanger / gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> It is part of the Ruby 'standard library' but you do still need to
>>> require a library before using it.
>>
>> Is this platform dependent? 'require' doesn't seem to be, er,  
>> required
>> on my SuSE system --
>>
>> hassan@ceylon:~> ruby -v
>> ruby 1.8.6 (2007-03-13 patchlevel 0) [x86_64-linux]
>> hassan@ceylon:~> irb
>> irb(main):001:0> DateTime.now.to_s
>> => "2007-08-20T14:14:31-07:00"
>> irb(main):002:0>
>
> Be careful with irb.  It has its own set of startup rules and  
> behaviors that
> are slightly different than Ruby itself.  Try:
>
> ruby -e 'puts DateTime.now.to_s'
>
> Ruby's startup behaviour can also be changed if the RUBYOPT  
> environment
> variable is set.
>
> On my installation irb shows 451 classes defined at startup while  
> the Ruby
> interpreter just shows 147 classes.
>
Good call, that's true, irb does require some things automatically.