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Rana P
885 PointsWhy did he return isHit, at 8.21?
I know it returns boolean so we have to return something but why and where should we return, what is its purpose?
1 Answer
Brad Wagner
9,379 PointsI can see why this is confusing. At this point in time it appears the only purpose of the method 'applyGuess()' is to determine if we store the guess input from the user in the 'hits' String or the 'misses' String.
Later however he also uses it along with another method for the purpose of validation: to also determine whether or not what the user entered was a valid String and not a symbol, space, etc. by including a check (through another method also in the 'Game' class called 'normalizeGuess()' which will be included in 'applyGuess()'s body). With that in mind, until we receive a TRUE or FALSE from 'applyGuess()', an Exception will be thrown. Until an exception is not thrown anymore and 'applyGuess()' finally returns TRUE or FALSE then we know we have valid input from the user. Therefore, true OR false returned from 'applyGuess()' is used to determine whether the user's input was acceptable. Basically, later in the lessons if we get a return from this method, it means everything checked out OK.
Maybe it would have been more clear to have returned 'true' if it was a valid guess and 'false' if it wasn't instead of 'true' if we got a hit? I'm not sure without reworking the code a little and at this point I don't know what the best approach is frankly. I think you found a good reason to start names of booleans with 'is' ;).