Boolean expressions in Java

Question

I have a question about the meaning (evaluation) of Boolean variables in return statements in Java.

I know that:

if (var) { ... }

i

Answer 1

Your confusion might be eased if you try thinking about operators as methods. Using your example, you had the < "less than" operator. For our purposes, the < operator can really be considered a "method" (it only doesn't look like one), which takes two parameters and returns a boolean result. If the "method" were named lessThan, your example would be equivalent to this:

public boolean lookBetter() {     
  return lessThan(b, a);     
} 

Perhaps seeing it like that makes it a tad easier to understand? Incidentally, when I was leading exercise groups in the 'Programming 101' course back in Uni, this proved to be by far the hardest thing to teach, and a lot of people had trouble grasping the concepts involved. It almost seemed to be akin to learning to ride a bike or to swim, once you get how it works it becomes self-evident in a way.