Spakman, I'm very excited about this. And I say this as someone who's writing his own ruby shell/shell-complement. Mine is mostly intended to be invoked from Bash the way you'd invoke grep, though it can also be run interactively, where it behaves like irb. The one clever thing I did is allow you to avoid escaping by putting your ruby command after a # on the bash command-line. Bash then ignores everything after the #, and crush (my shell) grabs the last line in the bash history and evaluates the part after the #.
I will definitely be trying out your shell. If you're curious about mine (feel free to steal code, no promises that everything works as committed):
https://github.com/afiler/crush
Cool! It looks like we also have similar ideas. I've been far too busy to get much time to look at any of the alternative shell projects this week, but I do intend to soon.
I was having similar thoughts about entering Ruby 'mode' (for want of a better term) with special characters. I'll be checking out your work soon.
All of these things make for some exciting stuff - I didn't realise others might be excited about them too!
I will definitely be trying out your shell. If you're curious about mine (feel free to steal code, no promises that everything works as committed): https://github.com/afiler/crush