No, the structure you found is how Java handles it (that is, with overloading instead of default parameters). For constructors, See Effective Java: Programming Language Guide’s Item 1 tip (Consider static factory methods instead of constructors) if the overloading is getting complicated. For other methods, renaming some cases or using a parameter object can help. This is … Read more
In Python, this: …is syntactic sugar, which the interpreter translates behind the scenes into: …which, as you can see, does indeed have two arguments – it’s just that the first one is implicit, from the point of view of the caller. This is because most methods do some work with the object they’re called on, so … Read more
The same works for tuples: And strings, which are really just arrays of characters: It was intentionally done this way so that lists, tuples and other container types or iterables didn’t all need to explicitly implement a public .length() method, instead you can just check the len() of anything that implements the ‘magic’ __len__() method. Sure, this may seem redundant, but length checking … Read more
A function is a piece of code that is called by name. It can be passed data to operate on (i.e. the parameters) and can optionally return data (the return value). All data that is passed to a function is explicitly passed. A method is a piece of code that is called by a name that is associated with … Read more
It’s a function which is a member of a class: Simple as that! (There are also some alternative kinds of method, allowing you to control the relationship between the class and the function. But I’m guessing from your question that you’re not asking about that, but rather just the basics.)
Java is always pass-by-value. Unfortunately, when we deal with objects we are really dealing with object-handles called references which are passed-by-value as well. This terminology and semantics easily confuse many beginners. It goes like this: In the example above aDog.getName() will still return “Max”. The value aDog within main is not changed in the function foo with the Dog “Fifi” as the object reference is passed by value. If it … Read more
I always thought Java uses pass-by-reference. However, I’ve seen a blog post that claims that Java uses pass-by-value. I don’t think I understand the distinction they’re making. What is the explanation?