-- Posted by knotsotypikal at 12:47 pm on Sep. 23, 2005 I have a nice little program written that's a test. It calculates the score and presents you with a letter grade and all. The program seems to be fine, but the stupid curly bracket things are messed up. How do you know where to put them? I keep getting errors that I need one here or there, and when I put one here or there, the newest one has the same error. Any help is appreciated. Thanks. -- Posted by anti christ at 12:48 pm on Sep. 23, 2005 lol I just started the Intro to Programming in my freshman college course, so I cant help you! lol -- Posted by knotsotypikal at 12:52 pm on Sep. 23, 2005 Oops. (Edited by knotsotypikal at 4:18 pm on Sep. 23, 2005) -- Posted by Plastik at 12:53 pm on Sep. 23, 2005 Curly braces are sort of like parantheses for blocks of code. For instance, if you're designing a class, such as main, you want { after "public class main" which indicates main contains all of the following. Then a } to close off the class when you're all done. You'll also need them for blocks such as: When there is more than 1 line to do after an "IF" statement When there is more than 1 line to do after a "WHILE" statement etc. ...if there's still a problem, send me the code in question and I can almost definetly show you exactly where the problem(s) are. (Edited by Plastik at 3:53 pm on Sep. 23, 2005) -- Posted by philippastar at 12:56 pm on Sep. 23, 2005 haven't got a clue, sorry -- Posted by knotsotypikal at 12:58 pm on Sep. 23, 2005 I think my problem is I'm putting too many. You don't need them before and after declaring variables, right? When I move some brackets around, I get x's on the whole thing, and then they go away. -- Posted by Plastik at 1:04 pm on Sep. 23, 2005 Well the following is a small class example just from what I currently have open at this very moment... It contains a field, a constructor, and a few short methods. ... basically everything you might see: package CardGame.Gameplay; import CardGame.Helpers.*; import CardGame.Cards.*; // Player's 'Hand' ... Just a list of cards. public class Hand { private List cards = new Empty(); public Hand() { } public void addCard(Card toAdd) { this.cards.add(toAdd); } public void removeCard(Card toRemove) { this.cards.removeCard(toRemove); } } p.s.: ALWAYS initialize your variables... Don't write int x; Write int x = 0; Otherwise you're opening the door for null pointer exceptions which are stressful and hard to track down. (Edited by Plastik at 4:05 pm on Sep. 23, 2005) -- Posted by knotsotypikal at 1:10 pm on Sep. 23, 2005 Aha! I had a char variable and I didn't set it to 0. I didn't know you had to set everything to 0, especially letters...and it said it wasn't initialized. It's fixed now, thanks. -- Posted by Plastik at 1:13 pm on Sep. 23, 2005 Quote: from knotsotypikal at 4:10 pm on Sep. 23, 2005 Aha! I had a char variable and I didn't set it to 0. I didn't know you had to set everything to 0, especially letters...and it said it wasn't initialized. It's fixed now, thanks. You can set it to anything. As for the char... a char is actually a number, so setting it to 0 is alright. If it was a string, you'd want something like ... String x = ""; But it can be anything  -- The problem is when anything looks at that variable before anything is put IN the variable...you get errors. Sometimes you might be looking at that variable without even realizing it, which just causes infinitely more confusion. So always remember to initialize it to SOMETHING.