A quick note to the FWP list: as Ruby can certainly be accused of being off-topic for fwp, and as someone has already complained about same, I'm taking the discussion off this list. Since I don't know of a good compare-and-contrast-languages-on-a-friendly-basis list, I'm just gonna exchange the email off-list directly, but I'll archive it in a separate folder, and just build a little list of the correspondents. Anybody interested in further discussion of ruby -vs- perl, please email me directly. -Bennett