[New] Help with a VERY simple asterisk program.

Question

Alright...I feel like a complete idiot asking this question..but I'm having such trouble writing this program. The program description is here:
Write a Java application using two for loops to produce the following pattern of asterisks.
I guess I'm really bad at algorithms yeah? Haha...well, any help would be very much appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi,
I don't think you don't need to look through any C programming books.
When you have a problem like this, do some thinking about what methods you need to use and what the general structure of the program will be.
You need to print asterisks out to the screen... so you'll need:
System.out.println
System.out.printAnd you already know that you need two loops.
Now you can ask yourself how you might use the print statements with two loops in order to design a basic structure for the program.
You have 8 lines, so you might want a loop that runs through 8 times, one of the lines printed each time.
Within this loop, you need another loop that prints out *'s. This loop could run once for each asterisk, but because there is a different number of asterisks on each line, the number of times this loop runs would be variable.
So a basic structure:
//loop1 that runs 8 times
    //loop2 that runs once for each *
        print one star
    //end loop2
//end loop1The key now is to recognise the difference between print and println. I don't know if you alread know, but System.out.print will print a string without creating a new line at the end, and println will create a new line at the end of the printed string.
Hope that helps. If you have any other problems, post specific questions along with the code you've written and are having trouble with.