Why do two strings separated by space concatenate in Ruby?

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In C and C++, string literals next to each other are concatenated. As these languages influenced Ruby, I’d guess it inherits from there.

And it is documented in Ruby now: see this answer and this page in the Ruby repo which states:

Adjacent string literals are automatically concatenated by the interpreter:

"con" "cat" "en" "at" "ion" #=> "concatenation"
"This string contains "\
"no newlines."              #=> "This string contains no newlines."

Any combination of adjacent single-quote, double-quote, percent strings will be concatenated as long as a percent-string is not last.

%q{a} 'b' "c" #=> "abc"
"a" 'b' %q{c} #=> NameError: uninitialized constant q

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