From: Sebastian Hungerecker <sepp2k@...>
Date: 2007-12-16T20:03:32+09:00
Subject: Re: I need help debugging my program

Icarus Daedalus wrote:
> puts "How old are you?"
> age = gets.chomp
> age.to_s

In this line you're asking ruby to give you a string representation of age.
This is superfluous for two reasons:
a) You're not storing the result anywhere or do anything with it. That's like 
if you have a line in your code that just says 2+2 and nothing else. to_s 
doesn't modify the receiver it just returns a string. If you don't use the 
return value, it does nothing at all.
b) gets always returns a string, so age is a string. Turning a string into a 
string is redundant.


> puts "What year is it?"
> year = gets.chomp
> birth = year -= age

Here you're trying to use the String#- method without previously defining it.
By default it's not possible in ruby to subtract strings, which is pretty 
sensible, cause what would "bla" - "blubb" even mean?


HTH,
Sebastian
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