Learn to Program, 2nd Edition

A Little Bit of Logic

Let’s take another look at our first branching program, here. What if my wife came home, saw the program, tried it, and it didn’t tell her what a lovely name she had? I wouldn’t want her to flip out, so let’s rewrite it:

puts 'Hello, what\'s your name?'
name = gets.chomp
puts 'Hello, ' + name + '.'
if name == 'Chris'
  puts 'What a lovely name!'
else
  if name == 'Katy'
    puts 'What a lovely name!'
  end
end

Hello, what's your name?
Katy
Hello, Katy.
What a lovely name!

Well, it works…but it isn’t a very pretty program. Why not? It just doesn’t feel right to me that the whole “Katy” chunk of code is not lined up with the “Chris” chunk of code. These are supposed to be totally equal and symmetrical ...