From: Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@...>
Date: 2005-12-31T15:39:40+09:00
Subject: Re: new to ruby, "requier" not working?

On 12/29/05, Justin Collins <collinsj@seattleu.edu> wrote:
> David Just wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> >       I'm trying to learn ruby from the Poignant guide to Ruby
> > (http://poignantguide.net/ruby/chapter-4.html) and have run into a
> > problem.   In chapter 4 the simple word replacement example is the
> > first use of the require statement.   It does not work for me.   I'm on
> > OS 10.3,  ruby 1.8.2 and my directory structure is :
> >
> > ~/projects/test.rb
> > ~/projects/wordlist.rb
> >
> >
> > test.rb starts with:
> > require 'wordlist'
> >
> > and wordlist.rb just has:
> > words  = {
> >     'starmonkeys' => 'Phil and Pete, those prickly chancellors of the
> > New Reich',
> >     'catapult' => 'chucky go-go', 'firebomb' => 'Heat-Assisted Living',
> >     'Nigeria' => "Ny and Jerry's Dry Cleaning (with Donuts)",
> >     'Put the kabosh on' => 'Put the cable box on'
> >   }
> >
>
> This has come up on the list before...
> 'words' needs to be a global variable or constant. It's basically a typo
> in the tutorial.
> Changing it to Words will get you a constant, changing it to $words will
> get you a global variable.
>
> When you require a file, the local variables in that file stay in that
> scope, and are not imported into the current scope. To be able to access
> them, you must make them global.

actually, you could use an instance variable too @words = { .. }
works just fine.  If you don't intend to change it, use a constant.

Otherwise, you can use an instance variable which is generally better
than a global.

sandal@karookachoo:~/Shared$ cat foo.rb
@something = "hello"
sandal@karookachoo:~/Shared$ ruby -e "require 'foo'; puts @something"
hello

Hope this helps
-Greg

PS: Has anyone noticed that my code examples seem to come from a
different shell EVERY time?  I need to learn to stick to a machine for
more than a week :)