Does the exclamation change the value of CorrectGuess or just check to verify that correctGuess is still false?

It changes what CorrectGuess evaluates to, but it doesn't change what is actually stored in it. Basically the ! operator takes the result of any Boolean value and reverses it. So if the value of CorrectGuess is false it is treated as true, and vise versa. But this is not a change that is stored back in the variable.

Also since there appears to be quite a bit of confusion about this, I'll clarify how the while statement looks at the condition you give it.

When you provide a condition to a while statement all it cares about is whether that condition evaluates to true or false. If it evaluates to true it runs, if it evaluates to false it does not run. When you perform a comparison that operation actually results in a Boolean value that reflects the result. So 5 > 3 becomes true, 2 === 10 becomes false and so on. This means that the while statement does not really look at and care about comparisons, it only looks at the Boolean value it ultimately receives. This holds true for other conditional statements like if as well.

That means that when the program starts out (with correctGuess equal to false) the !correctGuess condition evaluates to true. Since the while loop only cares about whether it is passed true or false this is an acceptable value for it to receive and it runs. Once correctGuess is set equal to true within the loop the !correctGuess condition will now evaluate to false (since it always becomes the opposite of the Boolean it is used on) and once the while statement receives false as its condition it stops running.

Edit: Added the additional info about how conditions are processed by the while statement.

hmmm thanks. I think I get that in theory, but practically not so much.

Isn't correctGuess already false to begin with? And assuming that the user did not guess the correct number, wouldn't the if statement just be skipped and the condition of correctGuess already being false continue as it was already established?

In that case wouldn't we then just need to verify that correctGuess is still false rather than reverse anything that hasn't even been changed in the first place?

OR is "! correctGuess" just a quick way of saying "If correctGuess is false, that's true, as in the true condition I want this code to be in to continue running" If that's right I'm guessing it's because a while condition won't even run if it's false, so this is a workaround eh?

Sorry for the deluge of questions!

Ah gotcha, thank you so much makes sense now!

That answer still doesn't make sense to me, because if the guess is correct, the correctGuess variable changes to true, which would mean, according to the explanation above, that the while condition would keep the guesses coming when the guess was correct (because if !correctGuess changes that newly changed true value back to false), which would give us the opposite of what we want.

I think your initial question was in the right direction. I think that the exclamation point is just checking to see if correctGuess is false, regardless of what was put in the correctGuess variable. We weren't taught this, though, so I'm not positive. But that's the only thing that makes sense out of this for me.

I think I get it now. Seems like a very confusing way of coding something that could be typed as:

} while (correctGuess === false)

Thanks for taking the time to write. :)

Apologies if my question is already answered in the dialogue above. I read all of it and still can't understand why the boolean value of correctGuess needs to be inverted using the "!".

If correctGuess is given a false value to begin with, why can't we write:

if ( parseInt( guess ) === randomNumber ) { correctGuess = true; } } while ( correctGuess )

It seems to me, correctGuess should remain false until the "if" function is met, and not need the "!" since the value has already been designated as false at the beginning. Is a while loop unable to recognize previously established variable values?

Thanks

Just wondering why do we need to use the ! operator. I understand what it does as far as changing boolean values to the opposite - but what is the technical reason for writing code using ! vs. correctGuess===false ? Understanding the technical purpose/context might make it easier for everyone to truly understand how to use the operator properly.