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Create Your Own Objects

Fill-in Methods

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Fill-in Methods

Occasionally you will see methods like addTime written with a different interface (different arguments and return values). Instead of creating a new object every time addTime is invoked, we could require the caller to provide an "empty" object where addTime should store the result. Compare the following with the previous version:

public static void addTimeFill (Time t1, Time t2, Time sum) {
sum.hour = t1.hour + t2.hour;
sum.minute = t1.minute + t2.minute;
sum.second = t1.second + t2.second;

if (sum.second >= 60.0) {
sum.second -= 60.0;
sum.minute += 1;
}
if (sum.minute >= 60) {
sum.minute -= 60;
sum.hour += 1;
}
}

One advantage of this approach is that the caller has the option of reusing the same object repeatedly to perform a series of additions. This can be slightly more efficient, although it can be confusing enough to cause subtle errors. For the vast majority of programming, it is worth spending a little run time to avoid a lot of debugging time.

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Create Your Own Objects

Fill-in Methods

Last Update: 2011-01-24