From: ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2001-12-20T00:11:40+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:28939] Re: What's the Ruby way of doing:

In article <3c20319c$0$23431$afc38c87@news.optusnet.com.au>,
Nightblade <nightblade@no.spam.thanks.com> wrote:
>Hi all.
>
>I'm new to Ruby, so please don't shout.  :-)  

Don't worry there's very little shouting in here...  Most of us are still 
relatively newbie or at least we still remember being there recently ;-)

>I used to really like doing
>these kind of things in Perl:  (example in metacode)
>
>  $debug and print "some kind of message"
>
>and:
>
>  unless $quiet print "extra info here"
>
>Is there a RubyWay(tm) to express this kind of Perl shorthand (besides using
>a class)?
>

Well, if I understand what you're trying to do - you want to print 
something if a 'debug' variable is set...

One thing to note: Ruby has a command line option ( -d ) that causes a 
global $DEBUG varible to be set to true if you use that option.

Now, let's say you run your program (call it debugging.rb) like so:
ruby -d debugging.rb

then if debugging.rb contains a line like:
print "this friendly debug message" if $DEBUG

you'll see: 
this friendly debug message

So, in general I think the way most folks use the form:

print "something about debugging here" if $DEBUG

(of course you could always use another variable in place of $DEBUG)
You could also do (from your example above):

print "extra info here" unless $quiet

Phil