What are the main syntax changes in Ruby 1.9?

Question

Also, I'm wondering what effect upgrading to Ruby 1.9 would have on legacy code from version 1.86. Is the new version backwards compatible?

Answer 1

Sam Ruby has a good slideshow of the major changes: Ruby 1.9: What to Expect

Just to highlight a few things that could break your code:

• Single character strings
• {"a", "b"} no longer makes a hash
• Block variables now shadow local variables