1.4. Dynamic Aspects of Ruby

Ruby is a dynamic language in the sense that objects and classes may be altered at runtime. Ruby has the capability to construct and evaluate pieces of code in the course of executing the existing statically coded program. It has a sophisticated reflection API that makes it more “self-aware”; this enables the easy creation of debuggers, profilers, and similar tools and also makes certain advanced coding techniques possible.

This is perhaps the most difficult area a programmer will encounter in learning Ruby. In this section we briefly examine some of the implications of Ruby’s dynamic nature.