Completed Homework

[ralphos]

I managed to complete the first assignment without any issues and writing the tests weren't a problem.

I got a little confused with the extra credit exercises.

For extra credit 1. I just created a Food class and converted the symbols to instances of Food. Not sure if this is what you were thinking?

For extra credit 2. I was also a little unsure as to what to do with a FoodBarge. I ended up creating a FoodBarge class, assuming that @foodbarge would be created as a new instance in IRB (since I found out that variables in your program aren't available in IRB). Now, when you call food_for on a FoodBarge object, it should check which class of animal it is dealing with and return an array of acceptable foods names' as strings.

So in IRB it'll be something like:

@foodbarge = FoodBarge.new
panda = Panda.new

food = @foodbarge.food_for(panda)
panda.feed(food)

When you call feed on panda it should go through the array of foods and if it likes? it it'll add to the meal count etc.

I got quite confused with writing the tests so I ended up writing the code and then trying to go back and write more tests. I guess my problem now is that I don't know what to test for exactly as well as being a little 'iffy' on rspec syntax.

[jwo]

Nicely done! What do you mean by "since I found out that variables in your program aren't available in IRB" ?

[ralphos]

Thanks!

To answer your question, what I wanted to do was instantiate a FoodBarge object within zoo.rb and assign it an array of hashes containing each animals foods, so I could quickly reference it. For example,

@foodbarge = FoodBarge.new
@foodbarge = [ panda: [:bamboo, :apples], lion: [:wildebeests, :zebras], human: [:burgers, :fries] ]

But I soon found out that when I tried to call the variable in IRB it was nil.

[jwo]

Ahh, ok... When you go into IRB, if you say

require "./zoo"

Then it will execute everything in zoo... And if you have the @foodbarge = Foodbarge.new, then you'll be good to go.

In a real-life program, you'd probably have something like:

class Zoo
  attr_reader :food_barge

  def initialize
    @food_barge = Foodbarge.new
    # also implement #animals
  end

end

Then in irb, you'd:

@zoo = Zoo.new
zoo_keeper = ZooKeeper.new
@zoo.animals.each do |animal|
  zoo_keeper.feed(@zoo.food_barge.food_for(animal), to: animal)
end

[ralphos]

Nice. That makes much more sense whereby all the animals, food_barge, zookeepers are all instances within the zoo class.