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Comment by tokamak-teapot | Hacker News Reader

Does nine really end up containing a string like that? I would have expected it to be the number 9.

The example is syntactically incorrect Crystal. Should be

  nine = while 1; break 9; end
  puts nine

And yes, it prints "9".

What is going on with the upvotes here? The incorrect comment by OP is upvoted, while this correct comment is downvoted.

  irb(main):001:0> nine = while 1 do break 9 end
  => 9

  irb(main):002:0> nine.class
  => Integer

  irb(main):003:0> puts nine
  9
  => nil

puts might be calling .to_s on the variable, which is why you see a string, but the loop does return an integer.

And just to be clear, to_s will return a string, but it will definitely not do the craziness of converting an integer into an English representation of the number!

    9.to_s
    => "9"

Sorry. Yes, you are correct.

I over-edited my comment to fit a narrow screen, breaking the example.

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