Next we continue our exploration of Kotlin objects. Objects combine state and behavior. In the previous lesson we showed how they can store data like variables. Now we’ll show how they can run algorithms like methods.
Last time we began experimenting with simple Kotlin objects. Consider an object that stores information about a room:
Our Room
class allows us to model a Room
s height, width, and name.
Let’s create a few instances!
Cool! But we said that Kotlin objects combine state and behavior. Where’s the behavior?
To start, let’s see if we can have each room print out the String
that we printed manually in the previous example.
We’ll go through how to do that together.
Let's play a guessing game!
Complete a method named getSecretValue
which is passed an instance of a Secret?
.
The Secret
class provides a single method guess
which accepts an Int
parameter.
It returns true
if you have guessed the secret value, and false
otherwise.
You can either require
that the passed Secret
is not null
or mark the parameter as non-null
able.
Write code to determine the secret value between 0 and 31, inclusive.
If the secret does not fall in that range, you should return -1
.
However, note that the Secret
class will fail if you guess again after you have already guessed the secret value!
So as soon as you find the secret, your code should return it and not guess again.
Additional guesses will cause your submission to be marked as incorrect.
What we’ve created above is called an instance method. In some ways it’s just like the other methods that we’ve written. But, because it is part of a class definition, it is also different.
Specifically, instance methods have access to the values of instance variables or properties.
We saw that in the walkthrough above, since our print function could access that room’s width
, height
, and name
.
Let’s continue exploring this together, and look at how instance methods can both access instance variables and accept parameters.
Instance methods can both access and modify instance variables. Let’s look at example of how that works.
Write a method hasDuplicateValues
that, given a Map<String, String>
, returns true
if the map contains
duplicate values—meaning that two different keys map to the same value—and false
otherwise.
Recall that a map can never contain duplicate keys, since the second mapping from the same key overwrites the
first.
You should use a Set
to solve this problem!
And as usual, maps, sets, and lists are all built-in to Kotlin and available for you to use to solve this problem.
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