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C# C# Objects Loops and Final Touches Magic Numbers and Constants

I need help understand the usage of these variables.

Like where it says

foreach(Invader invader in invaders) and FireOnInvaders(Invader[] invaders)

The usage of these variables have been confusing me constantly. Could someone please explain to me in detail how they're used? Thank you.

2 Answers

Daniel Crittenden
Daniel Crittenden
9,308 Points

Let's say you have a roster of football players in an array named FootballPlayers. Each item in that array is an individual FootballPlayer object with attributes such as their name, number, position, etc.

Let's say that you wanted to iterate through the array (AKA, the roster) FootballPlayers and print the names of each FootballPlayer to the console. It would probably look something like this:

foreach(FootballPlayer footballPlayer in FootballPlayers) { Console.WriteLine(footballPlayer.Name); }

This would result in each football player in the array having their name printed to the console. I also want to point out something about the C# language that may be a source of confusion for you:

Pay close attention to the casing. The first FootballPlayer indicates that this is a FootballPlayer object. Maybe in another example it's an int, double, or bool object.

The second footballPlayer in the foreach statement above is a placeholder for the variable name. We can put almost anything in here instead. For example:

foreach(FootballPlayer **player** in FootballPlayers) OR foreach(FootballPlayer **x** in FootballPlayers) OR foreach(FootballPlayer **FutureCTECandidate** in FootballPlayers)

Note that the asterisks are added for affect and should not be included in the code.

We use that placeholder variable, whatever it is, to interact with the FootballPlayer object during the for loop....so, if the placeholder is x, we could type x.TouchdownQuantity to extract the number of touchdowns that player had scored.

The last FootballPlayers (note the plural) is the variable name for the array (aka, roster) that was chosen.

Does that make sense/help at all? When all of the names are so close, I can see why it can be hard to keep up. Half the battle is understanding which aspects of the declaration are fixed and which ones you can adjust.

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,269 Points

In both cases "invaders" is an array of objects of the class "Invader".

In the first case, it's being used in a loop which will go through all of the items in it, one at a time.

In the other case, it's just being declared as the kind of argument that the FireOnInvaders function will take.