On Apr 9, 2006, at 8:59 AM, Joern Dinkla wrote:

> I programmed it to learn Ruby and to improve my coding skills,  
> because i have less than 2,5 weeks of experience with Ruby. I  
> bought the Programming Ruby" book  by Dave Thomas et. al. and  
> started to read it two weeks and two days ago and i used it a lot  
> the last 48 hours. I think there are some parts of the code where  
> there are better solutions or could be better expressed in a more  
> "rubyish" way.

For debugging statements like:

if ( $VERBOSE )
   puts "Calculating probabilities ..."
   STDOUT.flush()
end

I like to use the $DEBUG variable.  You can toggle it on and off with  
Ruby's -d command-line switch.

The call to flush is also not needed:

puts "Calculating probabilities ..." if $DEBUG

Hope that helps.

James Edward Gray II