I present you a summary of activity on the ruby-dev mailing list.


[ruby-dev:16750] Parametric Class

  Shin-ichiro Hara requested class_attr_* similar to attr_* so that we can
  easily access class variables.

[ruby-dev:16773] 1.7 early access kit
[ruby-dev:16790] Ruby Shim

  Knu proposed that he and his cooperators would develop the additional helper
  libraries for ruby-1.6 so that we could use some of ruby-1.7's features with
  ruby-1.6. The alpha version of a set of libraries are available now.

    http://www.ruby-lang.org/~knu/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/shim/
    http://www.ruby-lang.org/~knu/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/shim/ruby16/ToDo

[ruby-dev:16757] ===

  Knu suggested new specification for the methods Array#===, Hash#=== and
  Proc#===. They stand for "include?", "key?" and "call" respectively.
  For example, Proc#=== is simply used for the following case expression:

    case x
    when 0..5
      ...
    when proc{|x| x < 0}
      ...
    else
      ...
    end

  These specifications have not been accepted yet because of those un-trivial
  semantics.

[ruby-dev:16761] StringIO

  The concatenation operations of String have been improved in ruby-1.7.
  However, the StringIO was still slow on FreeBSD because of its malloc
  implementation. We cut calling rb_str_modify() and used rb_str_cat(),
  and then the performance improved (see [ruby-dev:16803]).

[ruby-dev:16765] Set

  Knu developed the class called Set. The worst retrieval cost of an array
  is proportional to the size of the array. Set provides fast retrieval
  which is one of advantages of Hash and useful operations like Array.

    http://www.ruby-lang.org/~knu/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/rough/lib/set.rb