From: Josh Cheek <josh.cheek@...>
Date: 2011-05-05T16:51:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Lets play a guessing game. (how to code this better?)

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On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 1:45 AM, Super Goat <ruby-forum@sgoat.33mail.com>wrote:

> I am a new Rubyist. I told my friend that I was learning Ruby. He asked
> me how that was going and then gave me a little challenge. His
> challenge, "Write a text game that guesses numbers 0-100". My reply,
> "you mean it picks a number at random, and you guess the number, it
> tells you higher or lower until you get it?". Up to this point I had not
> coded anything in Ruby on my own (aside from the examples in the book)
> and I saw this as a great first challenge. So here is what I got. It
> took me some time. I ran into trouble because I forgot to take into
> consideration the Class of the variables and couldn't figure out why the
> loops weren't working.
> My question to you all... how could I have done this better or do you
> seeing anything that is wrong.  Attached is the code. Thanks for the
> feedback.
>
> Attachments:
> http://www.ruby-forum.com/attachment/6168/100guess.rb
>
>
Hi, Super Goat :)

Congratulations on your first program! Hope you're enjoying Ruby.
Here are some thoughts, that might be helpful:

* On line1 your shebang is `#!/usr/bin/ruby`, but the best shebang is
`#!/usr/bin/env ruby` because Ruby can be located in lots of different
places, but env is always (I think) located in /usr/bin/env, and it is smart
enough to figure out where your real Ruby is and then invoke it.

* On line 4, you have `rand(100).to_i`, rand already returns an integer when
you pass it a parameter, so you don't need to use to_i on it (
http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Kernel.html#M001388)

* For that variable, I would have probably named it "target" rather than
"random", I think this clearer.

* On line 11, `if choice > random.to_i` again you are converting it to an
integer, but it is already an integer. (not harmful, but redundant and thus
confusing as it makes reader say "wait, I thought it was an integer already,
what did I miss?")

* Lines 13-14 look like this:
if choice > random.to_i
  puts "\nIncorrect, please choose a lower number."
  else puts "\nIncorrect, please choose a higher number."
  end

Your indenting is off, the if/else/end should be at the same level, and for
multiline conditionals, the code would go between them, so it should look
like this:

if choice > target
  puts "\nIncorrect, please choose a lower number."
else
  puts "\nIncorrect, please choose a higher number."
end

I would personally probably save space by putting the conditional into the
string like this:
puts "\nIncorrect, please choose a #{if choice > target then 'higher' else
'lower' end} number"

I'm not sure whether many other Rubyists would do that or not, but I like it
much better.

* On line 16, you have gets.chomp.to_i The chomp here is unnecessary,
because to_i will disregard anything after the digit.

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Anyway, nice job. Keep it up, after you get comfortable with the language,
you can play with gems, which is where all the fun stuff is!

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