Given a year, report if it is a leap year.
The tricky thing here is that a leap year in the Gregorian calendar occurs:
on every year that is evenly divisible by 4
except every year that is evenly divisible by 100
unless the year is also evenly divisible by 400
For example, 1997 is not a leap year, but 1996 is. 1900 is not a leap year, but 2000 is.
Though our exercise adopts some very simple rules, there is more to learn!
For a delightful, four minute explanation of the whole leap year phenomenon, go watch this youtube video.
Before you start, make sure you understand how to write code that can pass the test cases. For more context, check out this tutorial.
Most Java exercises include multiple test cases. These cases are structured to support a useful process known as test-driven development (TDD). TDD involves repeating a structured cycle that helps programmers build complex functionality piece by piece rather than all at once. That cycle can be described as follows:
The test files in this track contain all the tests your solution should pass to be considered valid. That doesn't immediately seem to be compatible with the cycle described above, in which tests are written one by one. However, the tool that we use to write our tests, JUnit, provides an @Ignore annotation that can be used to temporarily skip an already-written test. Using this annotation, we make sure that the test files we deliver to you satisfy the following rules:
This allows you to simulate the TDD cycle by following these slightly-modified steps:
@Ignore
annotation in the test file.Sign up to Exercism to learn and master Java with 22 concepts, 141 exercises, and real human mentoring, all for free.