Because I'm tired of solving math problems, I decided to try something more engaging with my very rusty (and even without the rust, very basic) Java skills. I landed on a super-simple people simulator, and thus far have been having a grand time working through the various steps of getting it to function. Currently, it generates an array of people-class objects and runs a for loop to cycle through a set of actions that alter the relationships between them, which I have stored in a 2d integer array. When it ends, I go look at how much they all hate each other. Fun stuff.

Trouble has arisen, however, because I would like the program to clearly print what action is happening when it happens. I thought the best way to do this would be to add a string, description, to my "action" class (which stores variables for the actor, reactor, and the amount the relationship changes). This works to a degree, in that I can print a generic message ("A fight has occurred!") with no problem. However, ideally I would like it to be a little more specific ("Person A has thrown a rock at Person B's head!"). This latter goal is proving more difficult: attempting to construct an action with a description string that references actor and reactor gets me a big old error, "Cannot reference field before it is defined." Which makes perfect sense.

I believe I'm not quite in programmer mode, because the only other way I can think to do this is an unwieldy switch statement that negates the need for each action to have its own nicely-packaged description. And there must be a neater way. I am not looking for examples of code, only a push in the direction of the right concept to handle this.