From: Patrick Hummer <hummerpj@...>
Date: 2008-05-29T02:05:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Learn to Program, by Chris Pine

Hey everyone I was having a slight problem with one of the examples in 
the book.  I was doing the '99 beers' example and ran into a problem at 
the end.  The task asks you to create a prog that will recite the lyrics 
for '99 beers on the wall' which seemed fairly easy to do but I wanted 
to make it more challenging for myself and make it more grammatically 
correct.  So I tried to create an if statement to change the word 
'bottles' to 'bottle' when bottles = 1.  I have seen another example 
creating a working solution but requires many more lines of code and I 
was trying to do it in a more clever way (maybe it is backfiring).  I 
just can't figure out why it is not working properly.  Anyway here is 
the code:

[code]
bottles = 99
bword = ' bottles'
while bottles != 0
  puts(bottles.to_s + bword + " of beer on the wall!")
  puts(bottles.to_s + bword + " of beer!")
  puts("Take one down and pass it around!")
  bottles = bottles - 1
  puts(bottles.to_s + bword + " of beer on the wall!")
  puts ''
  if bottles == 1
    bword = ' bottle'
  else
    bword = ' bottles'
  end
end
[/code]

and here is the output that isn't showing up as planned:

2 bottles of beer on the wall!
2 bottles of beer!
Take one down and pass it around!
1 bottles of beer on the wall!

1 bottle of beer on the wall!
1 bottle of beer!
Take on down and pass it around!
0 bottle of beer on the wall!

It doesn't work for the first line with a 1 on it and I wanted it to 
switch back to 'bottles' with the zero on the last line.  Any thoughts?

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