System.out.println

Question

I know the code they gave for the "Hello World" program was as follows;
import java.io.Console;
public class Introductions {
public static void main(String[] args) {
    Console console = System.console();
    // Welcome to the Introductions program!  Your code goes below here
    console.printf("Hello, my name if Craig");
  }
}
Why was "System.out.println" not used?

Lucas Brown · Answer

To add to Jennifer's answer, printf is used over println so it wouldn't have to be changed later. In the next video, you'll continue using the same code and use format specifiers to insert a variable into a string, which wouldn't work with println. It is possible use concat in println ( System.out.prinln( firstName + " rest of string" ); ) to achieve the same goal, but I personally find printf cleaner and easier to use, and there may be other advantages that are beyond the scope of this course.
I think your real question is why we're using System.out.printf over console.printf. I did some searching and decided the difference is beyond what we'll need to know for this course - as far as we're concerned, they do essentially the same thing.

Jennifer Nordell · Answer

Hi there!  My best guess, is that they might have planned to do something slightly different here, but changed their minds?  The "f" in printf stands for "format".  We generally use it when we want to use placeholder tokens that will later contain the string variant of the value of a variable.  That wasn't actually needed in this example and he could have just as easily used print or println.
Here is some documentation (https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/io/formatting.htm) on print/println/printf from Oracle.
Hope this helps! :sparkles:

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Michael Link

Michael Link

System.out.println

2 Answers

Jennifer Nordell

Jennifer Nordell

Lucas Brown

Lucas Brown