char hello[] = 'hello'; #C hello = ['h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o'] #Ruby If I output the class of hello[0] in Ruby, it says ‘String’. This is because single quoted Strings exist in Ruby and there does not seem to be the notion of a char type. The other day I said to my coworker that he had an array of characters and he said ‘no I don’t, I have an array of Strings’. Nitpicky, yes, but technically perhaps he is correct. Coming from the world of C I tend not to think of a single character as a String. Is it agreed that the hello array above is an array of Strings rather than an array of characters?
In C, a character is distinct from a string (which is an array of characters). Ruby does not have an individual character type. Strings can hold any number of characters, and Fixnums can hold the ASCII value for a character and be converted to a printable string containing that character with the #chr method.
The difference between the single-quote and double-quote string syntax in Ruby has to do with how much preprocessing (interpolation, for example) is done on the string.