[CSC 204] Something That you may Like

[Andrew J. Pounds]

While I know that some of you haven't started on your ShippingCrate 
file, others are in the midst of writing lots of methods to do various 
things.  Undoubtedly some of you are fighting with names of variables 
and how to keep instance variables separate from local variables and 
parameters.  Here is a neat little thing that you can do in Java that 
might help you keep some of this stuff straight.

Let's assume that we have a private instance variable in out class 
called diameter and that we need to write a method to assign a value to 
it.  In class I showed you how to do something like.

public void assignDiameter( double d){
     diameter = d;
     }


The cleaner and MUCH PREFERRED way to do this is something like...

|public void assignDiameter( double diameter){
     this.diameter = diameter;
     }
|

In the method above the this.diameter refers to the INSTANCE VARIABLE 
called diameter and the diameter in the method call is a parameter. If 
you do this the Java compiler will also help you catch some silly 
mistakes that you might make related to your instance variables.


-- 
Andrew J. Pounds, Ph.D.  (pounds at theochem.mercer.edu)
Associate Professor of Chemistry and Computer Science
Mercer University,  Macon, GA 31207   (478) 301-5627