Does Ruby have a plain-English keyword for exclusive or, like they have "and" and "or"? If not, is this because exclusive or doesn't allow evaluation short-cutting?
Firstly, I don't think shortcircuiting can sensibly apply to XOR: whatever the value of the first operand, the second needs to be examined.
Secondly, and, &&, or and || use shortcircuiting in all cases; the only difference between the "word" and "symbol" versions is precedence. I believe that and and or are present to provide the same function as perl has in lines like
process_without_error or die
I think the reason for not having a xor named function is probably that there's no point in a low-precedence operator in this case and that it's already a confusing enough situation!