From: claire pengelly <offbeatheartbeat@...>
Date: 2012-02-04T07:56:19+09:00
Subject: Difficulty writing a sorting method (Chris Pine's Learn to Program)

Hi all, I'm very, very new to programming and have been working through
Chris Pine's book. The assignment I'm working on is to write a sorting
method without just using .sort or recursion. It should sort a list of
words alphabetically. Here is what I have so far:

#get list of words
puts "Hello, type as many words as you want, with one word per line!"

words = []
already_sorted = []
unsorted = []
while true
   word = gets.chomp.capitalize
   if word == ''
    break
   end
end

words.push word

#defining the sorting method
words[0] = w
def alpha_sort words
  while w < 1
    if w < words.all?
      already_sorted << w
    end
  end
  while w < words.length
    if  w < unsorted.all?
      already_sorted << w
    end
    w += 1
  end
end
puts(alpha_sort(words))

The problem seems to be in using a variable to represent the array from
the earlier list as part of defining the alpha_sort method? I don't know
why that would be a problem though. And I'm sure there's probably a
bunch of other stuff wrong with it that I can't even see!
Getting the word list works fine, but afterwards this is the error I get
when running it:
"newwordlist.rb:14:in 'main': undefined local variable or method 'w' for
main:Object (name error)"

Thanks for your suggestions!

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