Question

I came across this code:

    for (final String s : myList)
    {
        s.equalsIgnoreCase(test);
        updateNeeded = true;
        break;              
    }

I suspect that this is not what the programmer actually wanted to do. I believe he meant to write something like:

    for (final String s : myList)
    {
        if(s.equalsIgnoreCase(test))
        {
            updateNeeded = true;
                break;
        }   
    }

However, I don’t understand why there is no error in the first code snippet.

 s.equalsIgnoreCase(test);    

since the method .equalsIgnoreCase(“anoterString”) returns a boolean and it is not being assigned to anything or used within a control flow statement

Answer 1

It’s just a method call. You don’t have to use the result of a method call for anything else.

It’s rarely a good idea to ignore the result of a non-void method (in particular, the return value of InputStream.read is sometimes ignored when it really shouldn’t be) but the language specification makes no attempt to call this out as a problem.