From: Walton Hoops <walton@...>
Date: 2009-09-10T05:12:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Tutorial challenge program help

> 7stud -- wrote:
> > Also, I should mention: your posts are totally unacceptable.  Before
> > learning to program, you need to learn something much more important:
> > how to write.  The people who post here and answer questions are not
> > illiterate high school dropouts.  Your sentences need to start with
> > capital letters and end with some form of punctuation, e.g. a period.
> > Writing a whole paragraph with no punctuation my be fine for
> > communicating with your MySpace friends, but it is not acceptable in
> an
> > academic environment.
> >
> > You've also somehow managed to post text with no newlines, which
> means
> > your text is all on one line.  That makes your text more than one
> screen
> > wide, which makes your post very irritating to try to read.

Chris wrote:
>      My apologies. I rarely do so on the internet till it has just
> become a
>  habit. I did not think it would bother anyone as it does not bother
> others
> I interact with on the internet. As for the new line error, once again
> my apologies, I have never used a forum like this before and I did not
> realise it would post like that.

Don't feel too bad, I think 7stud is getting a bit over excited here
(though his points are quite valid).  As you are new to this kind of a
list, a few pointers:

* Spelling and grammar is important here.  You are dealing with a large
number of academics, and they notice and care about these things. You
will likely find you are not taken seriously if your grammar is lacking.

* There are many here who use command line mail clients which don't
word wrap automatically, thus it's helpful to monitor your own
column length.  As I use Outlook I wind up doing this by hand (great fun).
A good rule of thumb is a column length of no more than 80 characters.

* Except for very small snippets, code should probably not go in the post.
There are sites (such as pastie.org) which are perfect for this purpose
and will even syntax highlight your code.

* Replacing tabs with spaces was mentioned earlier. This has long been
a holy war, which no doubt shall continue for years to come.  Go with
whichever you prefer.  It is worth noting that the ruby community seems
to predominantly prefer spaces with 2 spaces per tab.

I think most of your issues with your original program have been addressed.
Is there anything you are still lost on?

Walton