Introduction To Ruby

Every time we meet a new statement or structure in Ruby, we come across a cool alternative that is either easier, quicker to write or makes programming a little more natural than we expect. The times iterator is no exception.

Example 1

This example outputs the word 'Hello' exactly 5 times.

# times

5.times do
  puts "Hello"


Example 2

We can also use an iterator variable with our loop.

# times

5.times do |i|
  puts "#{i} Hello"


Make sure you check out the output of this program. It is a timely reminder that counting, in most programming languages, begins at 0.


  1. Pick out some of the programs you wrote with for loops. Refactor them so that they use the times method.