Question

I’m creating a maze program to get some more practice in Java. I have a method that moves the player, and it returns a boolean value if the move was successful (i.e. it didn’t run into a wall).

Here is the method in question:

public boolean move(Direction direction) {
    if(currentLocation == (currentLocation = maze.movePlayer(this, direction))) {
        return false;
    } else {
        return true;
    }
}

Obviously, this will always return false. I was wondering if there is a way to check if currentLocation didn’t change (or is equal to the returned value of maze.movePlayer(...) and set them equal if they aren’t). I don’t know if it is possible to do this without calling the method twice or using a local variable.

I hope this makes sense!

Answer 1

You can use the conditional operator:

public boolean move(Direction direction) {
     return (currentLocation == (currentLocation = maze.movePlayer(this, direction))) ? false : true;
}