lect03c
Nesting if-else

nesting `if`-`else`s

In our previous example for slicesReadyMsg, we handled zero as the same as any other plural. That was fine for a first attempt, but can we separately handle all three categories of 0, 1, and “more”, using just the syntax for if-else?

if (condition) {
  statements…
  }
else {
  statements…
  }

Yes:

 String slicesReadyMsg( String topping, int slicesReady ) {

    if (slicesReady == 1) {
      return "There is "
           + slicesReady
           + " piping hot slice of "
           + topping
           + " pizza, ready to eat!";
      }
    else {   // slicesReady isn't equal to 1
      if (slicesReady ==0) {
        return "We are momentarily out of " + topping + " pizzas.";
        }
      else {
        return "There are "
             + slicesReady
             + " piping hot slices of "
             + topping
             + " pizza, ready to eat!";
        }
      }
    }

Our page of syntax now includes several types of statements (any of which can be inside an if or else clause):

return statements,
local-variable declaration,
local-variable initialization,
local-variable declare-and-initialize (all on a single line),
if-else statements.

It's worth mentioning specially, that indentation starts becoming extremely important, to people reading your programs: it would be very easy to mislead people about what your program is doing, by being careless about indenting. After all, we had an if-else statement inside of another else clause, but it could conceivably also be written inside the if clause. Curly-brackets tell the computer what contains what else, but indentation is what tells humans how the code is structured. (If your code makes me stop to think about whether its visual structure matches what it really does, you will lose points.)

This idea of nesting an if-else statment inside another else clause is actually very common; it happens whenever we need to choose between more than two equal options. While what we wrote makes sense, it's annoying for two reasons:

If we have seventeen equal options we're choosing between, our code will “rightward drift” right off the screen.
More disturbingly, our code won't reflect how we think about the problem: if all seventeen options are equally important, why should some options contain the others, just because we consider them in some particular order? (“last” does not have to mean “least”!)

In response to these common concerns, Java includes a variant of the if-else statement, call the if-else-if statement. Here's an example:

/** Return a greeting, selected randomly from a list of several greetings.
 * @return A greeting (randomly selected, not necessarily uniformly).
 */
String greet() {
  int choice = (new java.util.Random()).nextInt(100);
  // We'll discuss the "new" statement later¹; here's the upshot: the local variable 
  // 'choice' now stores a number in the interval [0,99], a.k.a. [0,100).
  
  if (choice < 30) {
    return "Hello.";
    }
  else if (choice < 33) {  
    return "Aloha.";
    }
  else if (choice < 50) {  
    return "Buenos dias, amigo/amiga.";
    }
  else if (choice < 99) {  
    return "Yo.";
    }
  else if (choice < 100) {  
    // Not an advisable greeting.  Use sparingly.
    return "I am a javabot: System dot out dot println open \"hello\" close.";
    }
  else {
    System.err.println( "This statement is unreachable (I hope)." );
    return "A dummy return-statement to satisfy the compiler";
    }


  // Is this line ever reached?  Why or why not?

  }

Some discussions:

The return statement means “stop this function right now, and return an answer”. Thus ² the line at the end will never actually be reached, because one of the return statements will be selected first.
If choice is initialized with the value 30, what number is returned? How about 34?
What is the probability of returning Hello? How about Aloha? Half-open intervals make this answer easy (no having to decide whether add one or to subtract one)!
Is the choice < 100 branch actually ever taken?
What if we change “< 100” to “<= 100”?
What if we change “< 99” to “<= 99”?
If we leave off the “appeasing” return statement, the program doesn't compile; java complains “possible to reach end of function without a return statement”. Why? Discuss.
More fundamentally: Should the if (choice < 100) be omitted, so that it is the catch-all else? Consider—what if we have some mistake in our series of cases (say, accidentally leaving off the case, for some intermediate range of numbers)? Can the compiler catch such a mistake automatically?
guideline: If your last condition is easy to phrase (as it is here), then certainly include it, making the last else unreachable. But don't bend over backwards, to do this; sometimes formulating that final condition is more error-prone than the savings you'd get!
Mention: Arguably, it is bad to have more than one return in a method; (rather than always reaching the end of the method and returning a value there, for everybody to easily see). I don't insist on this, but you may have later teachers who do.

Technicalities

In an if-else statement, Java allows you to leave off the last else, if the curly-brackets would be empty. I suggest you don't do this; if the purpose of the entire if-else-if, is to initialize a variable, then every branch should initialize that variable, and similarly if the purpose of the statement entire is to return an answer, then every branch needs to return the answers. However, you will see other people write code which initializes a variable to a potentially-wrong value, and then go back and correct it when needed (which seems a bit sloppier than just initializing it to the correct value to start with):

  /** Given how many slices of (say) mushroom pizza are
   * currently available, create a nice tempting message
   * to advertise (shout out, or post, or put on a
   * LED sign...)
   * 
   * @param topping The type of pizza (e.g. "pepperoni")
   * @param piecesReady The number of currently ready-to-serve
   *    slices with the given topping.
   * @return A complete sentence describing the inventory.
   * For example:
   * inventoryMessage( "mushroom", 3 ) 
   *   = "There are 3 piping hot pieces of mushroom pizza, ready to eat!"
   */
  String slicesReadyMsg( String topping, int slicesReady ) {
    String verbForm  = "are";   // The correct verb for our result.
    String plurality = "s";  // The noun-suffix, correctly plural or singular.
    
    if (numInStock == 1) {
      verbForm = "is";
      plurality = "";
      }

    return   "There " + verbForm + " "
           + slicesReady +
           + " piping hot slices of "
           + topping + ("pizza" + plurality)
           + " in stock.";
    }

Moreover, when there is only a single statement in the body, the book reveals that you can conceivably omit the curly-brackets. ³
optional: The following explanation is optional, and will be skipped in lecture, as long as you read the concluding edict below.)
Alas, omitting the brackets is bad for several reasons:
1. It's fairly common that you decide later to go back and add something to the if- or else- case, and you end up adding the brackets later. Moreover, if you have several lines in a block and delete them down to just one, you'd want to delete the brackets to be consistent (and not cause readers to wonder if there is some unintentional bug).
2. This usually leads to confusion though, and the book has to spend several minutes talking about dangling elses.
3. Consider:
  if (numInStock == 1) verbForm = "is"; else verbForm = "are";
  What if we go back, and decide to add the lines for plurality, but we forget to put in curly-braces?:
  if (numInStock == 1) verbForm = "is"; plurality = ""; // DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! else verbForm = "are"; plurality = "s";
  Java gives an error “else without an if” -- why? If we hadn't had any else statement at all, would we have caught our error?

Edict: Even if you have only one line in an if- or else- block, include curly-braces.
One exception:

If the statement is so short it easily fits on the same line as the if or else keyword, you can put it on the same line (without curly-braces). (But don't be surprised if you find yourself later going back and adding more to that line, which will then require the curly-braces.)

Well, new is nothing too magical; it creates a particular instance of a class. In this case, the class isn't “PizzaServer” but “java.util.Random” (a longwinded name, indeed). And instances of this class can't be asked about pizzaArea, but they do know how to generate a nextInt randomly.

So far we have been making new instances in BlueJ by right-clicking on “new PizzaServer()” (or whatever our class is named), but “new” is actual Java code to do the same thing. Note that we could have even named this java.util.Random instance with a local variable, if we had wanted to:

    java.util.Random ro = new java.util.Random();
    int choice = ro.nextInt(100);

We'll talk more about new and local-variables-to-hold-instances in the following weeks, but all the fundamental concepts are in place!

↩

² So we could conceivably use a series of if statements (without else), rather than a big if-else. The second if statement is only reached when the first condition wasn't true (because in that case we'd return before ever reaching the second if condition). ↩

³So really, the actual syntax for Java's if-else statement is

if (statement)
  expression
else
  expression

This is actually a general case of the version-with-brackets, given in these notes. Why? Because along with assignment statments and return statements and if statements, there is a block statement, which looks like { statements… }. ↩

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lect03cNesting if-else

nesting if-elses

Technicalities

lect03c
Nesting if-else

nesting `if`-`else`s