A Few Things to Try

• “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” Write a program that prints out the lyrics to that beloved classic, “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”

• Deaf grandma. Whatever you say to Grandma (whatever you type in), she should respond with this:

  HUH?! SPEAK UP, SONNY!

  unless you shout it (type in all capitals). If you shout, she can hear you (or at least she thinks so) and yells back:

  NO, NOT SINCE 1938!

  To make your program really believable, have Grandma shout a different year each time, maybe any year at random between 1930 and 1950. (This part is optional and would be much easier if you read the section on Ruby’s random number generator here.) You can’t stop talking to Grandma until you shout BYE.

  Hint 1: Don’t forget about chomp! 'BYE' with an Enter at the end is not the same as 'BYE' without one!

  Hint 2: Try to think about what parts of your program should happen over and over again. All of those should be in your while loop.

  Hint 3: People often ask me, “How can I make rand give me a number in a range not starting at zero?” But you don’t need it to. Is there something you could do to the number rand returns to you?

• Deaf grandma extended. What if Grandma doesn’t want you to leave? When you shout BYE, she could pretend not to hear you. Change your previous program so that you have to shout BYE three times in a row. Make sure to test your program: if you shout BYE three times but not in a row, you should still be talking to Grandma.

• Leap years. Write a program that asks for a starting year and an ending year and then puts all the leap years between them (and including them, if they are also leap years). Leap years are years divisible by 4 (like 1984 and 2004). However, years divisible by 100 are not leap years (such as 1800 and 1900) unless they are also divisible by 400 (such as 1600 and 2000, which were in fact leap years). What a mess!

When you finish those, take a break! That was a lot of programming. Congratulations! You’re well on your way. Relax, have a nice cold (possibly root) beer, and continue tomorrow.