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JavaScript

Posted by Heather Garcia
Heather Garcia
2,251 Points

I accomplished this challenge but I'm curious..

First off I'd like to preface that I just started this JS course yesterday and that this challenge took me over TWO hours. I really fought hard to not click the Continue button to see the teacher's code because I knew this would be a really good learning lesson for myself. When I did finally accomplish it, I anticipated that our codes would be night and day, which it was.

My only question is that I noticed he called out the ${rank} variable in the beginning and left the value empty. ie: let rank = '';

I didn't include my rank variable until the end when I was calculating the score using

if ( score === 5 ) { rank = (Gold); }

Page functioned correctly, however I am wondering if there are any caveats to not include the initial variable call.

Thanks for your help and happy coding!

1 Answer

Jonathan Grieve
MOD
Jonathan Grieve
Treehouse Moderator 91,253 Points
Jonathan Grieve
Jonathan Grieve
Treehouse Moderator 91,253 Points

It's common to declare an empty variable and then change its value later on in the script.

You can do that because when you declare it you have the let keyword which allows you to do this, unlike const

Somewhere else in the program you have a variable called score with a value of 5. And that's what allows you to assign a new value to rank because that condition has been met and the action for that particular code block is to assign a new value to the rank variable.

If however you were to use let rank again as the variable that would completely redeclare it which would cause problems in your script.

Heather Garcia
Heather Garcia
2,251 Points

That makes so much sense, thanks so much for clarifying! I'll keep that as a best practice. Cheers