Yes. It would perhaps be clearer if I used a different character in the 
actual string. That way there wouldn't be two uses of 'n': one as a 
variable, one as a code character.

On Jun 19, 2004, at 12:48 AM, James, Roshan (Cognizant) wrote:

> He is just making an eample saying that if you represent a the number 5
> with any string that has 5 characters then we can do ... Etc etc. In 
> the
> following examples he simply uses a string of the character 'n'. There
> is no reason he could not have used 'hello', he is simply trying to 
> make
> an example for the hypothetical class called FunnyNumber.
>
>
> //-----Original Message-----
> //From: Carl Youngblood [mailto:carl.youngblood / gmail.com]
> //Sent: Friday, June 18, 2004 6:39 AM
> //To: ruby-talk ML
> //Subject: Re: "Litte Ruby" book
> //
> //
> //(commenting without having read the material quoted) Maybe he
> //is referring to computability theory and the way Turing
> //machines use strings of different lengths to represent
> //numbers.  The contents of the string aren't important in this
> //case, since usually there are only a few different possible
> //symbols, but the length of them is.
> //
> //On Fri, 18 Jun 2004 04:43:22 +0900, Photis <photis / oriste.com> wrote:
> //>
> //> > I'm here. I hope to restart at some point, but other
> //projects keep
> //> > getting in the way.
> //>
> //> I don't know if this is the right place, but reading this
> //tread got me
> //> to the "little ruby" book, so maybe you'll be patient with
> //me. I got
> //> stuck on page 9 of chapter 1, where it says:
> //>
> //> How can a String represent an Integer?    A String with n 
> characters
> //> represents the  Integer n.
> //>
> //> My confusion could come from the fact that English is not my mother
> //> tongue, but if I replace n with 5 and read the sentence
> //aloud, it says
> //> "a string with 5 characters represents the integer 5". So
> //the string
> //> "hello", which has 5 characters, represents the integer 5?
> //>
> //> That doesn't make much sense to me. What am I missing?
> //>
> //> photis
> //>
> //>
> //
> //
> <InterScan_Disclaimer.txt>

-----
Brian Marick
Consulting, training, and contracting
Mostly on agile methods with a testing slant
www.testing.com, www.testing.com/cgi-bin/blog