Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

Ruby

Posted by darius goore
darius goore
3,803 Points

Blocks benchmarking example

I don't understand the following:

"The times method will simply repeat however many times," I understand that "a" corresponds to the number of times the loop runs in the block and that i can add a print a in the superloop to see that. I don't understand how the "how_many variable gets defined Also, in this example we use block.call instead of yield. why?

4 Answers

minzawmra
PLUS
minzawmra
Courses Plus Student 15,682 Points
minzawmra
minzawmra
Courses Plus Student 15,682 Points

'how_many' is set by default to 1 if nothing is passed. It is a local variable of the method 'go.' In the example, it is set to 5 when called through: SimpleBenchmarker.go 5 <block>

darius goore
darius goore
3,803 Points
darius goore
darius goore
3,803 Points

Thanks! Why do we not use yield here?

minzawmra
PLUS
minzawmra
Courses Plus Student 15,682 Points
minzawmra
minzawmra
Courses Plus Student 15,682 Points

You can also use yield. I think it's just a matter of choice. block.call reads better and looks more obvious than yield.

Elaine Ryan
Elaine Ryan
6,771 Points
Elaine Ryan
Elaine Ryan
6,771 Points

Thanks! So for

how_many.times do |a|

is "a" getting passed 5?

Are we calling some public method called times on an object called how_many?

And in the self.go method which is the block that &block refers to?

I'm pretty confused here.