> I am new to Ruby and this brings up a question I have had lately.  Why
> were the 'magic' global variables copied from perl? And $= which is a
> new one.
> The ones that seem to be problems to me are:
> $= $/ $\ $, $; $>

As a Perl programmer, I'm trained not to use those variables for any large
program. This is not the case for small programs, but I won't use them
anyway, because small programs evolve into large programs. 

Those "features" appeal to the occasional programmers who write only small
programs. They are also the kind of features of a small language, like
AWK.

> The only merit I can find for these variables is they make the command
> line options very easy to impliment and let you write small one line
> programs.

This is, I think, most of the reason it's being kept.



Mathieu Bouchard