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ruby

A purely object-oriented scripting language. This language is a relative newcomer, but it is rapidly gaining popularity, and may well be the flavour of the future of programming.

To write a simple program in ruby, I open my favorite text editor and start a program with the following first line:
#!/usr/bin/ruby

Here is an example of a program that I wrote to help me understand the basics of the ruby language:

#!/usr/bin/ruby
#This is a comment
 a = Array.new
 print "Please enter a few words (type EXIT to stop):\n"

 i = 0
 while enterWord = STDIN.gets
   enterWord.chop!
   if enterWord == "EXIT"
     break
   end
   a[i] = enterWord
   i += 1
 end

#sort the array
for i in 0...a.length-1 do
  for j in i+1...a.length do
    if a[j] < a[i]
      tmp = a[i]
      a[i] = a[j]
      a[j] = tmp
    end
  end
end

#Output the results
print "You entered "  + a.length.to_s + " entries.\n\n"
for i in 0...a.length do
  print "Entry " + (i+1).to_s + ": "+ a[i] + "\n"
end

I save my ruby script to file "myprogram". To execute it, I need to type on the command line:
./myprogram

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