1.5.11 How to Initialize a Variable to Store a Return Value

Many times when doing math or logic there are times when a variable needs to hold a value while the method executes. Doing this is called initializing a variable.

Say we wanted to check if the Employee was actually an Employee by wrapping the calculation in logic that checks if the Employee's number isn't 0.

We get an error because the reference to the fatStacks variable only exists inside the curly braces. To fix this, we will initialize the fatStacks variable outside the conditional statement. In order for this to work properly we will need to assign it a value and remove the definition of the variable from the inside of the conditional.

When we run the application we can see that the fatStacks variable that is being returned is the 93.75 it is supposed to be.