FAQ: Banking on Ruby - Making a Withdrawal

Frequently Asked Questions Ruby FAQ
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This community-built FAQ covers the “Making a Withdrawal” exercise from the lesson “Banking on Ruby”.

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This exercise can be found in the following Codecademy content:

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FAQs on the exercise Making a Withdrawal

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2

Why doesn’t it seem to be possible to pass this exercise when using “? and :” instead of an “if, else, end” statement?

It is because the true condition has two elements “@balance” and “puts”?

If it is possible to use the “? and :” notation, could someone post their code?

3

“? and :” can only return the value of an expression.
“? and :” cannot replace all if/else statements, only ones that return one value if a given condition is true and another otherwise.

4

I found the following example on Stack Overflow found here-

Their question is a lot like your question: How do you make a "multiline ternary expression’.

This solution was offered:

condition ? (expression1 line 1; expression1 line 2; expression1 line 3) : expression2

However, the following caution was repeated by multiple users:

You should keep in mind that this reduces readability of your code. You are probably better off using an if / else statement to improve readability.

I went to used the ternary operator in the exercise just to see what it looked like, and how it worked.

def withdraw(amount, pin_number)
pin_number == pin ?
(@balance -= amount;
puts “Withdrew #{amount}. New balance: $#{@balance}.”):
(puts pin_error)
end

I went and made the same method using an if/else statement just to see what the folks on Stack Overflow were talking about:

def withdraw(amount, pin_number)
    if pin_number == pin
      @balance -= amount
      puts "Withdrew #{amount}. New balance: $#{@balance}."
    else
      puts pin_error
    end
  end

It does look a bit more straightforward with the if/else statement. I think the main difference is instead of using the symbols ? and : the words ‘if’ and ‘else’ are in their place. For me, this lends a lot to understanding the code more easily.

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