rubyspec isn't intended to be a specification per-se, its more meant to be able to test against mri behavior for other ruby implementations. Which isn't much help since the mri maintainers seem to ignore it. Until there is a proper actual spec, rubyspec is about the most complete "here's kinda how mri works, we think" without digging through the c source. Which is at times, maddeningly annoying with comments that are wrong etc... I'd say hop in #jruby or #rubinius on freenode and you'll quickly learn how annoying conforming to mri ruby behavior can be.

My biggest gripe with ruby is that unlike most other languages its development is rather opaque unlike say python. I think this has to do with the primary group being Japanese.

http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_... looks to be the current status of the ISO standard, found a draft version but its in japanese, severely limiting what I can glean from it.

http://www.wiki.ruby-standard.org/index.php?title=Main_Page&... looks to have been part of the standardization process but hasn't been updated for years.

But yeah TDD is pretty heavily promoted, but primarily from the rails side of rubyists. I've used ruby for 10 years, only just now made a gem with tests in it, mainly to see what all the rage is about. Is it nice? For some things yeah, but not entirely necessary, I agree with Rich Hickey, only throw up guard rails where accidents will occur. Don't hit them all the way to the store.

Sorry for the rambling, back to my cage.