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iOS Object-Oriented Swift 2.0 Classes High Level Overview

Robin Nilsson
Robin Nilsson
3,783 Points
Posted by Robin Nilsson
Robin Nilsson
3,783 Points

Won't the while loop always drain the enemy's life completely?

In the method fireAtEnemy(), we have a while loop that decreases the life of the enemy by the strength of the tower in each iteration. Since the loop will continue till the enemy has no more health, is there really a purpose to this loop as currently written?

Won't the while loop always just drain the enemy's life completely? And in that case, wouldn't it make more sense to simply set enemy.life = 0 instead of bothering with the while loop at all?

2 Answers

Kelly Ford
PLUS
Kelly Ford
Courses Plus Student 7,658 Points
Kelly Ford
Kelly Ford
Courses Plus Student 7,658 Points

As I read it, the use of the while loop means that it will continue to decrease the enemy's life until it is 0. I think ideally it should be an "if"... 

if enemy.life > 0 {
  enemy.decreaseHealth(self.strength)
  if enemy.life = 0 {
    print("Enemy vanquished!")
}
...
Thomas Miele
Thomas Miele
18,388 Points

It would be an "if" inside a loop iterating for movement, but there is no movement in this simplified example

Paul Ryan
Paul Ryan
4,584 Points
Paul Ryan
Paul Ryan
4,584 Points

I am not familiar with the code you are referring to but I assume eventually there will be some conditions within the while loop that may break the loop before the enemy's life is completely drained.