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iOS Swift 2.0 Collections and Control Flow Introduction to Collections Adding Items to Arrays

Posted by James R
James R
Courses Plus Student 8,446 Points

Appending Arrays ...

I have been watching this section in Swift about appending arrays, which is something that all languages can do. in in swift you write out another line of code. 

ArrayName.append(newElement)

so my question is this. if you are just creating the array to begin with, why the need to add an extra line of code to append it? why not just make the changes directly in the array itself ?

not sure the reasoning for appending something that has to change to begin with? I am also very new to programming so maybe i am missing the obvious ?

Harold Davis
Harold Davis
Courses Plus Student 14,604 Points

Hi James!

There will be a time when you may have an empty array to keep track of something. Like a student roster...

let studentRoster = ["harold", "james", "tiffany"]

then you may get a new student for the class... an you need the teacher to be able to add to the roster records(lame example sorry lol)

studentRoster.append("Gabby")

hopefully this helps buddy.

James R
James R
Courses Plus Student 8,446 Points

Harold,

thanks for the answer, I get the need to append, what i don't fully get is why go through the extra steps to add a new line of code to do this..

wouldent it be eaiser and faster to just drop a coma, and add a new name?

Harold Davis
Harold Davis
Courses Plus Student 14,604 Points

Oh! i see your concern its not so much the ability to add someone in code, rather in the future you will be the programmer and your program has users, of course the user does not see the code, so think of it like this the array is like i said a student roster, but as the programmer you may need to make some kind of function for when the student admin gets on the computer and adds a student. as the programmer it will look like this 

let studentRoster = [""]

func addAStudent(name: String, Age: Int, Grade: Int) {
             studentRoster.append(name,Age, Grade) 
}


if (Administrator hits the  new student button) {
              addAStudent

}

for the Administrator it will just look like name:____ age:_____ grade:____ after they click on new student

let me know if this helps a little more