ruby--ruby/spec/ruby/language/README

There are numerous possible way of categorizing the entities and concepts that
make up a programming language. Ruby has a fairly large number of reserved
words. These words significantly describe major elements of the language,
including flow control constructs like 'for' and 'while', conditional
execution like 'if' and 'unless', exceptional execution control like 'rescue',
etc. There are also literals for the basic "types" like String, Regexp, Array
and Integer.

Behavioral specifications describe the behavior of concrete entities. Rather
than using concepts of computation to organize these spec files, we use
entities of the Ruby language. Consider looking at any syntactic element of a
Ruby program. With (almost) no ambiguity, one can identify it as a literal,
reserved word, variable, etc. There is a spec file that corresponds to each
literal construct and most reserved words, with the exceptions noted below.
There are also several files that are more difficult to classify: all
predefined variables, constants, and objects (predefined_spec.rb), the
precedence of all operators (precedence_spec.rb), the behavior of assignment
to variables (variables_spec.rb), the behavior of subprocess execution
(execution_spec.rb), the behavior of the raise method as it impacts the
execution of a Ruby program (raise_spec.rb), and the block entities like
'begin', 'do', ' { ... }' (block_spec.rb).

Several reserved words and other entities are combined with the primary
reserved word or entity to which they are related:

false, true, nil, self              predefined_spec.rb
in                                  for_spec.rb
then, elsif                         if_spec.rb
when                                case_spec.rb
catch                               throw_spec.rb