Question

Can you create a line of code, within a while-loop, that will create a new array AND change the array’s name with each iteration of the while loop?

Example:

int size = 10;
int name_count = 1;

while(size <= 100)
{
    //name_count is changing the name of the array by calling it
    // "array1", "array2", etc...
    //I know this may not be correct code for changing the name of
    // the array, but it is suppose to get the point across.
    int[] array(name_count) = new int[size]; 

    for (int i = 0; i <= size; i++)
    { /* Adding numbers to an array */ }

    size = size + 5;
    name_count++;
}

Answer 1

Identifier names need to be defined at compile time. So you can’t explicitly use a different variable name on each iteration of the loop.

Another problem with your pseudo-code is that, if the array were to be declared inside the loop, it would fall out of scope when the loop completes, so there wouldn’t be much point.

To do something like this you need to use some collection to hold the arrays, and it would be easier to make them explicit objects instead of just arrays. Something like:

List<List<Integer>> listOfArrays = new ArrayList<List<Integer>>();
while (size <= 100) {
  List<Integer> listOfNumbers = new ArrayList<Integer>(size);
  /* insert loop here to add numbers to listOfNumber */

  size += 5;
  name_count += 1;
}

Then you can access each list of numbers using an index into listOfArrays — equivalent to naming each one with the index, but handled at runtime instead of compile time.