Question

This is for a yahtzee game and this method is supposed to compute and return the value of the five dices. But is this a dumb way of doing this, having a switch statement that get passed by parameter which category the user has selected and then a for loop for each possible category. Is there maybe an much easier way of doing this, than my design idea?

private int assignScoreToCategory(int category)
{
    int computedScore = 0;
    println("dice: "+dice1+" "+dice2+" "+dice3+" "+dice4+" "+dice5);

    //  Switches on the category the user has selected.
    switch (category)
    {
    case ONES: 
        for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++){
            if (diceArray[i] == ONES){
                println(computedScore);
                computedScore++;
            }
        }break;

    case TWOS: 



        break;
    case THREES: break;
    case FOURS: break;
    case FIVES: break;
    case SIXES: println("cat 6");   break;
    case UPPER_SCORE: break;
    case UPPER_BONUS: break;
    case THREE_OF_A_KIND: break;
    case FOUR_OF_A_KIND: break;
    case FULL_HOUSE: break;
    case SMALL_STRAIGHT: break;
    case YAHTZEE: break;
    case CHANCE: break;
    case LOWER_SCORE: break;
    case TOTAL: break;
    default: return 0; 
    }
    return computedScore;
}

Answer 1

You should most definitely employ enum instead of int. Then, as a further improvement, move the logic contained in the switch statement into an instance method of your enum. Then you can replace the switch by just a single method call. There is nice syntax to provide a different implementation for every enum member. Combine this idea with a single common method implementation that covers as much ground as possible, possibly with the help of some instance variables:

enum Category {
  private final int score;
  ... 
  ONES(1) { 
    public int score() { 
      int computedScore = 0;
      for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++) {
       if (diceArray[i] == ONES) {
          println(computedScore);
          computedScore++;
       }
      }
      return computedScore;
    }
  },
  ...,
  SIXES(6),
  ...;

  private Category(int score) { this.score = score; }

  public int score() { return this.score; }
}

I would like to give you a fuller example, but you don’t provide much concrete logic.