In addition to the RUBY_VERSION constant and friends you may also want to check out Config::CONFIG. This hash contains not only the version numbers but also a ton of other useful runtime information, like the path to the binary, the hostname, ...
You can then use Gem::Version to do version string comparison:
require 'rubygems' # Only needed for ruby pre-1.9.0 but it's safe for later versions (evaluates to false).
if Gem::Version.new(RUBY_VERSION) < Gem::Version.new('1.9.0')
extend DL::Importable
else
extend DL::Importer
end