"Joshua Drake" <jd.nospam@commandprompt.com>=20 wrote in message news:to335diag2p2ff@corp.= supernews.com...

> Hello,
>
> I am the author of the Programming in = ruby on=20 IBM Developworks.
...
> I am getting ready to release the = second=20 article, but I want to get
> some feedback from the ruby community = first.=20 I would like the second
> article to be more ruby centric and will = need=20 some help.
...

> while 1

...
> end

Although this loops forever, as you intend, I would guess that it = doesn't=20 do so for the reason you think. Also it is very misleading code = because=20 people who are used to C would expect that 'while 0 ... end' would not = loop at=20 all, but in Ruby it is also an infinite loop. Ruby treats all = values=20 except false and nil as meaning 'true'.

Secondly, Ruby provides an infinite loop method: 'loop = {block}'. I=20 would use this in preference to 'while true ... end'.

Finally, please refactor your program before publishing the=20 article. The code, as it is, is poorly structured and therefore = not a good=20 example of Ruby -- the script uses global variables for no reason, the = methods=20 are far too long, code structures are repeated instead of being = abstracted as=20 methods, and so on. Also, the program doesn't use any of = Ruby's=20 interesting features, such as creating domain specific iteration=20 statements. I would suggest rewriting the example using these kind = of=20 idioms, otherwise all you are demonstrating is that Ruby has a different = syntax=20 to Perl. You could also demonstrate Ruby's open classes by = defining your=20 iterators as methods of the built-in File class, and demonstrate = Ruby's=20 singleton methods by adding methods to the STDIN object.

E.g. the main loop should look something like this:

File.open( address_file ) do |file|

STDIN.each_address_input do |addr|

file.write_address( addr = )

end

The each_address_input method is a singleton method that reads = addresses=20 from the input stream until the user inputs END.

The write_address method would write an address into the file in = the=20 standard format.