A lot of this kind of stuff is more about language and standard lib culture than strict language features. Ex - Rust actually has exceptions, technically, in the form of Panics, and you can infact catch them. But the culture of Rust is strongly against using panics in that way. Basically never catch panics and only allow them to happen when you're okay with the whole program blowing up. Use Option and Result and check them if you care about your program not blowing up.
Similarly, Ruby has nice blocks, and many other languages have similar closure support. But Ruby's support is so built-in from day 1 and heavily used in the standard library and the general culture of Ruby gems. Many of the methods in Enumerable take blocks, making it easy to chain a bunch of functional stuff together, even without any support gems and from the earliest days of Ruby.
Just parameters that are functions, except that you can only have one per function.
I still fail to see the advantage of blocks over being able to pass functions as arguments like in other languages.
One nice feature of blocks is that `return` will return from the enclosing function, rather than the block, so you can write:
def find(x, l)
l.each do |y|
return y if y == x
end
end
Where in Lisp you'd use (return-from find x) and in other languages you might pass in a continuation or use a special return value protocol. It's a nice solution for higher order functions that are supposed to feel more language-level.
Also, you can pass functions as arguments like in other languages; lambdas behave like you would expect them to.
Similarly, Ruby has nice blocks, and many other languages have similar closure support. But Ruby's support is so built-in from day 1 and heavily used in the standard library and the general culture of Ruby gems. Many of the methods in Enumerable take blocks, making it easy to chain a bunch of functional stuff together, even without any support gems and from the earliest days of Ruby.