Which return statement i should use.

Question

I have a problem regarding the return statement that i should use in the following programe.
//Printing random letters without vowels
public class Capitals {
  public char mymethod (){
     int counter = 0;               // Counter for number of capitals generated.
    int numberToGenerate = 20;     // Number of capitals to generate.
    char symbol = 0;               // Variable to store a random character.
    // While there are still letters to generate:
          while( counter < numberToGenerate ) {
      // Generate a random symbol between A and Z:
      // This relies on the fact that the codes for the letters are in a
      // contiguous sequence from 'A' to 'Z'. If we add 1 to 'A' we get the
      // code for 'B', if we add 2 we get 'C', and so on. Thus to create a
      // random capital letter from 'A' to 'Z' we can add a random integer
      // between 0 and 25 to 'A'.
      symbol = (char)(26*Math.random() + 'A');
      switch(symbol) {
        //Vowels ignored:
        case 'A':
        case 'E':
        case 'I':
        case 'O':
        case 'U':
          break;
        default:
          //Consonant displayed:
          System.out.print(symbol + " ");
          counter++;
          break;
return symbol; // My Problem is here <<<<<<<<<<<<<
public static void main(String args[])   {
Capitals myCapitals=new Capitals();
myCapitals.mymethod();
}Can anyone kindly guide as to what return statement i should use in mymethod() so that it can be called in the main.
thanks

Answer 1

return types are not compulsory. there's a school of though amongst some 'C' programmers, that all functions should return something, even if the returned value is of no interest most of the time. some C compilers even force this behaviour, I think it's part of some standard but I can't remember now
anyways, methods that have something to return need a return type, those that don't can be void. if you're invoking a method just to get it to do some work, it can probably be void, but if it's doing some computation for you you'll likely want to know the result, hence it must return something