From: Jason Lillywhite <jason.lillywhite@...>
Date: 2008-05-17T00:52:31+09:00
Subject: newbie questions

I feel like we need a Forum called, "Ruby Newbie" for people like me. Is
there one?

I am hoping someone could help me with the following (probably) simple
questions (my nested questions are surrounded by **):

1. Someone said to use the following code for getting a string and
printing to the screen:

puts "Where do you live?"
STDOUT.flush
city = gets.chomp
puts "I live in " + city

**why not just do this:**

puts "Where do you live?"
city = gets()
puts "I live in " + city

??

regarding STDOUT: the comment was made - STDOUT is a global constant
which is the actual standard output stream for the program.

**but is it necessary?**

A comment was made: flush flushes any buffered data within io to the
underlying operating system (note that this is Ruby internal buffering
only; the OS may buffer the data as well). The usage is not mandatory
but recommended.

**I still don't understand why flush is recommended. Is my omission
going to create a problem?**

**I understand chomp to remove record separators from the end, is there
another reason besides?**

2. Is there a place I can go to learn more about regular expressions?
3. In IRB, Float::DIG => 15
**question: This is because float displays to 15 decimals, right?
**question: I see "::" all the time, but don't understand it. What does
:: mean? Is it showing hierarchy?
4. In the code below:

class NameIt
  def initialize(name)
    @name = name
  end
  def to_s
    puts "My name is: #{@name}"
  end
end

n1 = NameIt.new("tom")
n2 = NameIt.new("sally")

n1.to_s
n2.to_s

**the last 4 lines seem very repetative. this is something I've wondered
for a long time. Is there a way to compact the last 4 lines if you are
trying to list a whole bunch of names at once using the method to_s?

thank very much!

Jason
-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.