What’s Shiny and New in Ruby 1.8.0?

The best description of what's new in Ruby 1.8 by "why the lucky stiff":
.c( whytheluckystiff )o. -- What's Shiny and New in Ruby 1.8.0?

The changes include:
- new allocate method to create blank (uninitialized) objects
- to_str method
- anonymous modules and classes via blocks in Module.new and Class.new
- classes and constants can be declared using fully qualified names (Foo::Bar) instead of surrounding them with module declaration
- initialize_copy constructor is called on clone or dup
- New methods in Enumerable, Array, Hash, and Range
- REXML
- YAML
- WEBrick
- Ruby/DL
- StringIO
- open-uri
- PrettyPrint (pp)
- more