rubytarball.tar.gz

Do you want to be an interpreted language geek? Are you tired of getting entangled in the dense syntaxes? Does it irritate you to compile your code to machine language first? Are you looking for an easy-to-use scripting language? Well, Ruby is the best pick for you then!

Ruby is a smart, easy-to-use, functional, Object-Oriented programming language, which comes as a wondrous mix of Perl's scripting power, Pythonic capabilities and much more! As Matsumoto, creator of Ruby, implies: "I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language."

This introductory course will be providing you with hands-on practice with the support of a bunch of interactive illustrations, exercises and the integral topics of variables, built-in classes, objects, conditionals, blocks and much more!

Cool, right? Ready to dive into one of the most influential and demanding third generation programming language? Let's tune in!

Ruby: An Amateur's Pitch

In Ruby, a method always returns exactly one single thing (an object).

The returned object can be anything, but a method can only return one thing,
and it also *always returns something*.

><span>💡</span>
>
>Every method always returns exactly one object.


# Returned `Nil`?
The object returned could be the object `nil`, meaning "nothing", but it still
is an object.  Also, in order to return a bunch of things at once, we could
return an Array that holds the things that we are interested in, but the Array
itself is just one object.

# No `return` Statement !
Also note that in Ruby we do not have to use the statement `return`, as in
other languages. In fact, most Ruby code does not use the keyword `return` at
all.

This is extremely convenient, but it is also something we need to learn:

If we don't do anything else, then a method will return **the value that was
returned from the last evaluated statement**. Most often, this is the last line
in the method body.

This is important to understand. Please read that sentence again:



><span>💡</span>
>
>If we don't do anything else, then a method will return the return value of
the last evaluated statement.

In our example method ...

 



This lesson focuses on how and what a method returns values.

Return Values