From: "Michael W. Ryder" <_mwryder@...>
Date: 2008-08-28T09:50:22+09:00
Subject: Re: Having a difficult time with Case statements.

Chris Bailey wrote:
>  I am trying to implement a simple frontend for a text adventure that
> I'm putting together for ruby practice. My idea was to use case - when
> to validate player input and to progress through a menu system,
> character creation and the loading of character files. The code runs
> cleanly for me but effectively does absolutely nothing. I've exhausted
> about every idea I've had for a nice clean format for handling this and
> I've decided to ask someone that knows what they are doing. I've
> attached the source file in question and I would greatly appreciate it
> if someone could have a look and offer me some advice on what I'm doing
> wrong or how to better design said system. All feedback is welcome,
> Thank you.
> 
> Attachments:
> http://www.ruby-forum.com/attachment/2623/startup.rb
> 

Looking at your code it looks like you need to remove the first case 
statement and use something like a while loop.  From what I can see it 
looks like when you select '2' it changes 'startstate' to 1 and then 
exits the case statement.  An alternative is to set startstate in the 
main program and then call startUp with the current startstate -- i.e. x 
= startUp(startstate).  Then test x to see if you want to call startUp 
again or exit the program.