> The question being... what exactly is an implementation of Ruby?  I
> know this has come up before, but I still don't have a handle on it.

That is a very good question.  I think Matz's implementation is Ruby with
lots of practical and script-useful add-ons.  It's an incredibly pragmatic
tool.  A lot of this is owed to the language concepts.

Point is, because there's only one implementation, there isn't an
official(?) language standard yet.  Ruby is not an academic ideal, it's a
tangible tool.

I'm hoping to implement a pure language version. No perlisms, no FileIO, no
SAFE, no threads, just classes, modules, arrays, strings...enough for the
language itself to be complete.

I think the language has more potential than just competing with
Perl/Python.

--
Justin Johnson.