$22.$ Reflect on Exercise $4$

What we had you do with first$\_$vowel may seem weird. At first we had you return the length of the string if no vowel was found. Then we had you change it to $-1$ at the very end. Why do it this way? Why not make a failed find return $-1$ in the very beginning, especially since this is how the function find$\_$str in introcs works?

You could have done it this way. You could have written your code as follows:

result $=-1$ # Nothing found yet

if something

do something

$...$

return result

skipping over each if statement if the vowel is not there.

But you would have to change your if statements a lot to account for this. And depending on your comfort with boolean expressions, you might find it harder to do it this way. What do you think?

Do you think our approach was easier than starting with $-1?$ Why or why not?