On Jul 27, 12:36 ¨Âí¬ ÐòáôååÁçáò÷á¼ðòáôååë®á®®®Àçíáéì®ãïí¾ ÷òïôåº > I am new to Ruby and am still learning some of the basic stuff. > What's the method name for the Power operation(as in 'a' to the power > 'b')? > -- > Posted viahttp://www.ruby-forum.com/. Whoops. I forgot to paste in the program (sorry), which follows: =begin # Note this comments out all lines until the =end def power(a,b) result=a**b # "a" should be "a.chomp.to_1"; ditto "b"; # the "chomp" removes the newline which the user presses # "result" is unnecessary result.to_i # does nothing return result # unnecessary: # Since we've eliminated everything else, the method # has only one statement, i.e. the expression # a ** b with the replacements suggested above # Ruby returns the last statement's value end puts "a=" # use printf rather than puts (which appends a newline) a=gets a.to_i # does nothing; "a" does not get change, and the result # is discarded puts "b=" # same as "a" b=gets b.to_i # ditto as for "a" c=power(a,b) # numeric result assigned to c, probably an integer but # not necessarily puts "c=#{c}" # These final two lines might be more elegantly # written in Ruby as suggested below =end # The result of all these changes are the following 8 lines # (plus blank lines); save them, say, as: Test.rb # and run them as: ruby Test.rb def power(a,b) a.chomp.to_i**b.chomp.to_i end printf "a=" a = gets print "b=" b = gets puts "%d**%d = %d" % [a, b, power(a,b)]