Oh... about four.
Some forests have more than four trees. But for us, let's stick to four.
A more realistic Forest
object would have many trees, and this would call for
an array or other data structure.
Those are topics of future chapters.
// Forest.java // public class Forest { // instance variables private Tree tree0=null, tree1=null, tree2=null, tree3=null; ... }
Our Forest
object is composed of four reference variables
that each point to a Tree
.
Although you think of a Forest
as being composed of four objects,
what it really has is references to those objects
(which in turn reference yet other objects.)
When a Forest
is complete there will be 13 objects:
a Forest
object,
composed of four Tree
objects,
each composed of a Cone
object and a Cylinder
object.
(Review: ) The reference variables of Forest
are initialized to null
.
What does null
mean?