Why we are making the method normalizedGuess private?

Hi noob,

In Java it is convention to keep things private if they don't need to be directly accessed, as well as to create ways of accessing things that are consistent and controlled.

normalizeGuess is not particularly useful as a direct call outside of the game class, especially as it throws exceptions based on the hits or misses of in the instantiated Game object.

Put another way, normalizeGuess is just a helper method for the public applyGuess method. applyGuess is how we want people to check guesses for the game object, and during an application of a guess is the only time we (currently) expect normalizeGuess to be called. To prevent confusion we make the number of possible interactions as few as possible to prevent programmers from incorrectly calling normalizeGuess then passing the result to applyGuess, which would cause normalizeGuess to run twice. Not a problem in this case, but if normalizeGuess changed any state or had any other side effects, we may want to control how often they trigger.

In short, as we don't expect normalizeGuess to be used outside of other methods in the Game class, it should be private.

Cheers,

Eric

Effectively, when thinking in an object-orientated way, you need to think do you need this method to be accessed outside of the class ? If you think you will use the method outside the class then you should make it public otherwise make it private. Making it private prevents any unnecessary changes to the object.

For your case, you have no need to normalize the guess outside of the class as that's used internally to validate the input and to give reusability to the object.

Hope this helps