Simultaneous text input/output in a command line game

ruby-talk
1

Just from the tip of my head:

t = Thread.new {
  while true
    sleep 5
    puts "What are you waiting for, dude? Enter something now: "
  end
}
puts "Enter something: "
s = gets
t.kill
puts "You entered: #{s.inspect}"

Gennady.

···

-----Original Message-----
From: rubyvic [mailto:rubyvic@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, February 11, 2006 22:08
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: Simultaneous text input/output in a command line game

Hi everyone!

I'm currently learning Ruby, and have made this simple number
guessing game:
____________________________
puts "I'm thinking of a number from 0 to 10. What's your guess?"

my_number = rand(11)
user_guess = gets.chomp.to_i

until user_guess == my_number
if user_guess > my_number
puts "Too high."
else my_number > user_guess
puts "Too low."
end
puts "Guess again:"
user_guess = gets.chomp.to_i
end

puts "Yep, it was " + my_number.to_s + ". You win!"
____________________________

A friend of mine wrote a Java version which you can see here:
http://violasong.com/tonyguessinggame.java\. In addition to
what my script does, his is able to taunt you with a random
message if you don't input any data for 5 seconds :).

I want to try adding that functionality to my script, and am
wondering if it's possible in Ruby - to print a message every
x seconds *while* it's waiting for you to input something. If
someone could point me in the right direction, that would be
much appreciated!

Victoria Wang