Not that I want Ruby to be anything like PHP and Perl, but this is the same thing that happens in those languages due to the difference in precedence of and, &&.
Oh I know... someone said ruby is two parts Perl, one part Python, and one part Smalltalk. I like to think it's a bit less Perl than that, but my judgement is clouded - I'm a bit of a Perl hater.
I think it's a little less Perl than that, and a little more Lisp than that.
I don't have enough Perl experience to have a strong opinion on it, but I know that Matz says he created Ruby because he wanted a language that was more powerful than Perl and more object-oriented than Python.
Ruby is a little bipolar in that sense. It's both highly functional and highly object-oriented, for an imperative language. Even more of a "Swiss-army chainsaw" than Perl.