Just for fun, I decided to add references to Ruby.
I decided to use Perl's backslash syntax, so for example you'd write \foo to take a reference to the local variable foo. You can also take a reference to instance variables, class variables and globals.
I have attached a patch in this gist if you're interested in the implementation or you want to try it out on your own copy of Ruby.
This was just a fun little exercise for me - I don't expect that this would ever be merged in to Ruby itself.