times iterating does not work

Question

I am trying to iterate times with a variable. Why does the variable a not count up?

a=0
pre="a"
until a > 10 do
 a.times print pre
 a +=1
end

Answer 1

It's a little hard to tell from the code, but is the idea that the prepended text (pre) gets printed incrementally more times after each loop? E.g like:

a
aa
aaa
# etc...

You can achieve that with:

10.times do |i|
  i.times print pre
end

Answer 2

Should be a.times { print pre }