How were we suppose to come to this conclusion with the information we've been given?

Hey Ben!

The challenge can come as tricky, but it is certainly important to get into the habit of learning about initialisers.

Most classes you may have dealt with may inherit their init method from a parent class, whereas classes that we create require some sort of init() method to initialise a class instance.

What you did was very useful for practising how to pass arguments through to the init method! Alternatively, the follow code also would have worked:

// Enter your code below
class Shape {
  var numberOfSides:Int

  init() {
    //alternative to what you wrote, this will hardcode EVERY instance of Shape to have 4 sides
    self.numberOfSides = 4 
  }
}

let someShape = Shape()

You can also have multiple init methods for different reasons! A great example in the Apple Documentation shows a struct for Celsius that has two init() methods which take arguments from Kelvin for one init() method and Fahrenheit for the other.

Check the docs out!

This phase of Swift took me ages to figure out, but just keep at it and refer to the docs for help and good practise and you'll be home and hosed!

OK, step by step. First, we will create a class named Shape:

class Shape {

}

Then, inside the class, we will create a stored property named numberOfSides. Since we will not be assigning it a value we need to give it a type: Int:

class Shape {
   var numberOfSides: Int


}

Since this is a class and not a struct, we need to write an initializer, as all stored properties must have a value (be initialized) when any Shape object is created. (Structs are different in that they have a default member-wise initializer "built-in".) Since we have only one stored property our initializer will have only one input parameter:

class Shape {
   var numberOfSides: Int

  init(sides numberOfSides: Int){
    self.numberOfSides = numberOfSides
  }

}

Here init acts like a function (or method). It takes a value when called and assigns that value to the stored property. Here the parameter has an internal name numberOfSides, an external name sides ,and a type Int. You need the keyword self here to disambiguate between the local variable the init will create to hold the numberOfSides value and the stored property which will be initialized with it. If you wrote it this way:

  init(sides aNumberOfSides: Int){
    numberOfSides = aNumberOfSides
  }

you wouldn't need to use self, as their is no ambiguity between numberOfSides (the stored property) and the input parameter/local variable aNumberOfSides.

So now the class is done, and we want a Shape object:

let someShape = Shape(sides: 3)

Here we create a constant named someShape and assign it a Shape object with 3 sides. Note that it has Shape(sides: 3) rather than Shape(numberOfSides: 3). That's because, in the init(), you gave it an external parameter name. You now have a Shape object with 3 sides.

Hope this helps!