Problem

Print out the entire lower case letters of the alphabet. Use the following guidelines when coming up with a solution:

• char for printing out each of the lowercase letter's in the alphabet.
• Output using System.out.println
• Comment as you code.
• To get the next letter in sequence use the increment operator.
• To repeat the incrementation, we need to use For Loops.

...By Students

"Comments are very important in documenting how your program works. They make it easier for the marker to understand and grade your work and it also makes it easier for someone else to understand it. Commenting as you code is a very important skill that you should acquire."

"I usually don't comment as I code but I have been trying to change that. For small first year assignments not commenting as you code is okay because it is easy to add afterwords. But when you are working on later assignments and you end up having 600+ lines of code it gets quite a bit harder to add them at the end. I remember having to spend a couple of hours after I finished coding an assignment in order to add in all of my comments; I found that very stressful and not enjoyable. It is easier and more enjoyable to document code as you write it."

Solution

When printing out the alphabet you are going to need to know the number of letters to stop the for loop at the right time.

 //final indicates that this is a constant
//Uppercase also indicates that this is a constant
final int NUMLETTERS = 26; 

For printing out the letters you are going to need a char variable. A char type have an equivalent ASCII code integer. Like the example below, 'a' is equal to 97 in ASCII code.

 char letter = 'a'; //initialize the first letter 

Since char type have an equivalent ANSI code, incrementing the variable will also increase the ASCII code integer. In order to get the next letter, increment the variable "letter".

 char letter = 'a';
letter++; //will increment the letter

System.out.println("letter = " + letter) 

 letter = b 

Since you need to increment NUMLETTERS times, you need to use For Loop.

 for(int i = 0; i < NUMLETTERS; i++)
{
    //code to be added here later
} 

Putting all of this code together we can get our final for loop which will print out the alphabet.

 for(int i = 0; i < NUMLETTERS; i++)
{
    System.out.println(letter);//print out the current letter
    
    letter++;//increase the letter to get the next
} 

For the complete final code you can look under the code heading.

Code

Solution Code

public class PrintOutTheAlphabet
{
    public static void main(String [ ] args)
    {
        //final indicates that this is a constant
        //Uppercase also indicates that this is a constant
        final int NUMLETTERS = 26;
        //the initial value of letter will be a since we are printing out the lower case alphabet.
        char letter = 'a';
        
        //our for loop will run from 0 to NUMLETTERS - 1
        for(int i = 0; i < NUMLETTERS; i++)
        {
            //print out the current letter
            System.out.println(letter);
            //increase the letter to get the next
            letter++;
        }
    }
}