You might be wondering what happens when we have an app with lots of variables to keep track of. What about our Note to Self app with 100 notes, or a high score table in a game with the top 100 scores? We could declare and initialize 100 separate variables as follows:
Note note1; Note note2; Note note3; // 96 more lines like the above Note note100;
or
int topScore1; int topScore2; int topScore3; // 96 more lines like the above int topScore100;
Straight away, this can seem unwieldy, but what about when someone gets a new top score or we want to let our users sort the order their notes are displayed in? Using the high scores scenario, we have to shift the scores in every variable down one place? A nightmare begins.
topScore100 = topScore99; topScore99 = topScore98; topScore98 = topScore97; // 96 more lines like the above topScore1 = score;
There must be a better way. When we have a whole array of variables, what we need is a Java array. An array is a reference...