From: Garthy D <garthy_lmkltybr@...>
Date: 2012-06-07T16:49:49+09:00
Subject: Re: "Create a rock paper scissors program in ruby WITHOUT using conditionals"


Hi all,

For giggles, I decided to solve this in the most obscene manner 
possible, without using conditionals. I came up with:

print ARGV[1-((ARGV[0][0..0].downcase[0] - 
ARGV[1][0..0].downcase[0])%5)/3] + "\n"

It requires Ruby 1.8. It needs a few tweaks for the Ruby 1.9 series I 
believe. It handles upper and lower case, and only uses the first letter 
of each arg.

It is left as an exercise for the reader to explain why this actually 
works. ;)

For the assignment though, I'd probably use hashes as per Peter's 
suggestion.

Garth

On 07/06/12 08:20, David D. wrote:
> I'm in an introductory software development class, and my homework is to
> create a rock paper scissors program that takes two arguments (rock,
> paper), etc, and returns the arg that wins.
>
> Now I would make quick work of this problem if I could use conditionals,
> but the assignment says everything we need to know is in the first three
> chapters of the ruby textbook, and these chapters DO NOT include
> conditionals! Would it be possible to create this program without them?
> Or is he just expecting us to be resourceful and use the conditionals.
> It's a very easy assignment with conditionals though...I'm thinking that
> I might be missing something here.
>