Question

still fairly new to ruby, and wrote this very simple recursive function.

  def test(input)
    if input != 0
        test(input-1)
    end
    if input == 0
        return true
    end
  end
  puts test(5)

from my Java knowledge I know this should return true but it doesn’t. It seems like the return statement doesn’t actually break out of the method. how do I fix this? thanks

Answer 1

If you watch carefully you will see that the method does in fact return, but it only unwinds the stack one level and continues executing code in the caller.

The problem is that you forgot a return:

def test(input)
    if input != 0
        return test(input-1)
    end
    if input == 0
        return true
    end
end
puts test(5)

With this fix, the result is as expected:

true

See it working online: ideone