In article <019d01c1db46$446a85f0$0e01a8c0 / DynRom.local>, Philip Mateescu wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm very new to Ruby and unfortunatelly I only had little time to look over
> the pickaxe (my bad, my bad).
> 
> Here are some of my questions I couldn't seem to get answer to:
> 1. How can I make a long statement span multiple lines ? With other
> languages a statement mostly ends with a terminator, but Ruby has only new
> line (VB has _)

You can make it clear to ruby that something else is coming by splitting
a long expression after a binary operator e.g.

[mike@ratdog tmp]$ cat try.rb
#!/usr/bin/env ruby

x = 1 +
    3

y = 1
    + 3

puts "x is #{x} y is #{y}"
[mike@ratdog tmp]$ ./try.rb
x is 4 y is 1

> 2. Is there an equivalent to the perldoc utility ? Or something I can use to
> get quick info about classes, methods, etc ? (I could be wrong, but the
> source only seems to produce ruby.exe - have I missed something ?)

rdoc (http://rdoc.sourceforge.net/) might be what you're lkooking for, but
I don't think it does stuff like

  perldoc -q unique

ri (http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/ruby/downloads/ri.html) might also
be interesting.

> 3. Besides the manual, is there any other way I can find out what are Ruby's
> keywords and get documentation about what is bundled with Ruby ? I'd like to
> extract this and make an api file (err... some sort of ctag file) for my fav
> editor (SciTE).

Have ypu looked at what comes with the Pragmatic Programmers installable
Ruby (if you're on windows)?

http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/ruby/downloads/ruby-install.html says

  Includes the interpreter, documentation, Tk and FOX support, and the
  SciTE editor.

Hope this helps,

Mike

-- 
mike / stok.co.uk                    |           The "`Stok' disclaimers" apply.
http://www.stok.co.uk/~mike/       | GPG PGP Key      1024D/059913DA 
mike / starnix.com                   | Fingerprint      0570 71CD 6790 7C28 3D60
http://www.starnix.com/            |                  75D2 9EC4 C1C0 0599 13DA