hello.rb

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

def hello(name)
	puts "Hello #{name}"
end

hello("Joel")

Is there such thing as constant strings, as in the single-quoted strings in PHP? I know it's a very minor performance gain, but I've never liked PHP's parsing of double-quoted strings.

I'm not sure I would say they are "constant strings", but the difference between single-quoted strings and double-quoted strings is that you cannot do string interpolation - "hello $name" with single quotes, you must use concatenation - 'hello '.$name. I'm unsure about performance gains, I would doubt they could be at all significant, unless perhaps you had a VERY large loop! I like to use whatever is most readable, and often if variables are involved then it is double quotes.