From: Vincent Manis <vmanis@...>
Date: 2011-04-15T06:57:43+09:00
Subject: Re: Hello

On 2011-04-14, at 07:52, James Nathan wrote:

> maybe that is why I am having such a hard time with it. but the other Ruby Programs to see if they are up and running.
> James Nathan 

Several of us have been advising you to stay away from FreeRIDE. Here's a suggestion for you, James. 

1. Go to tryruby.org and play with the Ruby system there. Try out some simple Ruby statements and see how they work there.

2. Open a Command Prompt window on your own computer, and type 
  
   irb

If this works, you should see the same kind of output you got at tryruby.org. You can try the same examples there as you did at tryruby.org. If Windows complains that it doesn't know about irb, then you may have Ruby installed wrong. Read the directions for installing Ruby carefully, and reinstall it. 

3. Once you have that working, open Notepad, and type a small Ruby program in. Save it in a file named something.rb (the part before the . can be anything you like, but it must end with .rb). Because of a limitation in Notepad, when you save the file the first time, you must put the name in double quotes: "something.rb". Now, in your Command Prompt window type `ruby something.rb'. If your program doesn't have any mistakes in it, it should run correctly. 

Hope that helps -- vincent