Question

I started playing around with Ruby on Windows. I downloaded Ruby and started it with the command line with Ruby.

I typed in irb to the command prompt and it changed to the irb command prompt.

Then I started trying out commands like 1 => 1; and other things, but I got no output. I just go the next prompt. What ta heck am I doing with that? 🙂

What should I do to make sure I have RoR set up and start creating applications?

Thanks and sorry for the generally confused question.

Answer 1

In irb you can tell if your current line is unterminated doesn’t start with >.

irb(main):001:0> "I'm gonna wait
irb(main):002:0" to finish this string"    # The string isn't terminated
=> "I'm gonna wait\nto finish this string"
irb(main):003:0>

But more interestingly in irb it would seem that a semi-colon(;) it won’t terminate the line. Since semi-colons(;) inRuby aren’t necessary and are just meant to be statement separators. irb won’t actually run your statements until you end one without a semi-colon. Also 1 => 1 isn’t a valid Ruby statement.

irb(main):001:0> string = ""
  => ""
irb(main):002:0> string << "I'm gonna run this line\n";
irb(main):003:0* string << "Plus this line\n"
  => "I'm gonna run this line\nPlus this line\n"
irb(main):004:0> string << "Semi-colons are not cool in Ruby"
  => "I'm gonna run this line\nPlus this line\nSemi-colons are not cool in Ruby"
irb(main):005:0>

So your problem should be solved by NEVER using semi-colons in Ruby

Also all these examples were run on Windows 7 using Powershell

PS C:\Users\Justin> ruby -v
ruby 1.9.3p0 (2011-10-30) [i386-mingw32]

As Aaron mentioned the best way to get started is probably RailsInstaller. I haven’t used it personally, but it looks like it does pretty much everything for you.

I use RubyInstaller and set up my Rails environment myself. RailsInstaller does all that for you.