From: Stu <stu@...>
Date: 2011-05-08T15:16:21+09:00
Subject: Re: Lets play a guessing game. (how to code this better?)

On Sun, May 8, 2011 at 12:08 AM, Super Goat <ruby-forum@sgoat.33mail.com> wrote:

>
> I was thinking of asking if the player would like to play again and then
> figuring out how to restart the whole thing but I wasn't sure how to do
> this. How can I make prompt to "Play again?" and when answered "Yes"
> restart, whether the person wins or loses (or if "No" just exits)?  Or
> is the way my code is written make this impossible?
>
> Attachments:
> http://www.ruby-forum.com/attachment/6181/meth_100guess.rb
>
>
> --
> Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
>
>

You can do it with more methods. In fact you should break as much down
as possible. The concept is to keep every method as small as possible.
Does one thing and does it well. Ruby allows you to add ? at the end
of a method name which should return true/false so you could almost
have it kind of tell a story.

Ruby is also liberal with it's parens and has implied return statements.

so for a contrived example a traditional language would look like this:

def add_num( first_num, second_num)
  answer = (first_num + second_num)
  return( answer)
end

x = add_num( 42, 100)

where in ruby it could look like this:

def add_num first_num, second_num
  first_num + second_num
end

x = add_num 42, 100

methods always return a value (this is contrast to functions which do
one thing and do it well but may only return success or error) Ruby
has only methods.

Methods give the user the ability to reuse code using the example above:

x = add_num 42, 100
y = add_num( x, 16)
z = add_num( y, x)
puts z
=> 300

using good names for your methods make it easier for others to read
them as well as making them easier to read years later if you ever
have to revisit.

Method definitions start with the def keyword, the method name, then
there are optional arguments which are variables passed as copies into
the scope of the method. The method body can contain the same code
logic you have which reads much like a fall through shell script right
now. Every method closes with the end keyword.

The last statement returns regardless in ruby.

My personal preference in style is to keep the parens in the
definition but only use the return when I need to force it:

def add_num( first_num, second_num)
  first_num + second_num
end

Once you have normalized the script in pure methods we can then begin
to talk about how user created methods can relate to user created
classes and start talking about object oriented programming.

~Stu