From: Stephen Kratzer <kratzers@...>
Date: 2008-01-26T04:27:40+09:00
Subject: Re: to sleep no more

On Friday 25 January 2008 13:25:00 DrBenway wrote:
> hi all,
>
> I'm a ruby noop trying his first steps. I'd like a little advice.
>
> What I want to make is the following.
>
> An object Chicken
> - its attribute starts as 'egg'
> - after x times sleep() it the attribute gets the value chicken
> - x times sleep later the object can make a call to make a new
> instance of chicken (creating another egg)
>
> I could make a method to change the attribute and call this from my
> main program.
> In other words  my sleep method would be in my main program and call
> the objects method.
> I was wondering if it would be possible to keep the sleep in the
> object.
> (Since I was planning on creating some other animals as well, each
> with a special amount of time needed to go to the next step.)
>
> I think it's called threads in ruby but I'm not sure.  (if it's called
> threads is this the way to handle this problem? Does it act like an
> Ajax call?)
>
> Many thnx
>
> DrBenway

Something like this might work for your purposes:

class Animal
        attr_reader :incubation_period, :maturation_period, :from_type,
                    :to_type, :current_type, :slept, :children

        def initialize(i_period = 60, m_period = 120, from = "egg", to 
= "chicken")
                @incubation_period = i_period
                @maturation_period = m_period
                @slept = 0
                @from_type = from
                @to_type = to
                @current_type = @from_type
                @children = []
        end

        def mysleep(seconds = @incubation_period)
                @slept += sleep(seconds)
                if @slept >= @incubation_period
                        @current_type = @to_type
                end
        end

        def give_birth(count = 1)
                if @slept >= @maturation_period
                        for number in children.length..(children.length + 
count - 1)
                                puts "I had another child."
                                children[number] = 
Animal.new(@incubation_period, @maturation_period, @from_type, @to_type);
                        end
                else
                        puts "I'm too young to give birth."
                end
        end
end

snake = Animal.new(5, 10, "egg", "snake")
snake.mysleep(4)
puts snake.current_type
snake.give_birth
snake.mysleep(4)
puts snake.current_type
snake.give_birth
snake.mysleep(4)
puts snake.current_type
snake.give_birth(5)