2.8: Adding Times

Suppose you are going to a movie that starts at 18:50 (or 6:50 PM), and the running time is 2 hours 16 minutes. What time does the movie end?

We’ll use Time objects to figure it out. Here are two ways we could “add” Time objects:

• We could write a static method that takes the two Time objects as parameters.
• We could write an instance method that gets invoked on one object and takes the other as a parameter.

To demonstrate the difference, we’ll do both. Here is a rough draft that uses the static approach:

public static Time add(Time t1, Time t2) {
    Time sum = new Time();
    sum.hour = t1.hour + t2.hour;
    sum.minute = t1.minute + t2.minute;
    sum.second = t1.second + t2.second;
    return sum;
}

And here’s how we would invoke the static method:

Time startTime = new Time(18, 50, 0.0);
Time runningTime = new Time(2, 16, 0.0);
Time endTime = Time.add(startTime, runningTime);

On the other hand, here’s what it looks like as an instance method:

public Time add(Time t2) {
    Time sum = new Time();
    sum.hour = this.hour + t2.hour;
    sum.minute = this.minute + t2.minute;
    sum.second = this.second + t2.second;
    return sum;
}

The changes are:

• We removed the keyword static.
• We removed the first parameter.
• We replaced t1 with this.

Optionally, you could replace t2 with that. Unlike this, that is not a keyword; it’s just a slightly clever variable name.

And here’s how we would invoke the instance method:

Time endTime = startTime.add(runningTime);

That’s all there is to it. Static methods and instance methods do the same thing, and you can convert from one to the other with just a few changes.

There’s only one problem: the addition code itself is not correct. For this example, it returns 20:66, which is not a valid time. If second exceeds 59, we have to “carry” into the minutes column, and if minute exceeds 59, we have to carry into hour.

Here is a better version of add:

public Time add(Time t2) {
    Time sum = new Time();
    sum.hour = this.hour + t2.hour;
    sum.minute = this.minute + t2.minute;
    sum.second = this.second + t2.second;

    if (sum.second >= 60.0) {
        sum.second -= 60.0;
        sum.minute += 1;
    }
    if (sum.minute >= 60) {
        sum.minute -= 60;
        sum.hour += 1;
    }
    return sum;
}

It’s still possible that hour may exceed 23, but there’s no days attribute to carry into. In that case, sum.hour -= 24 would yield the correct result.