Making Choices

Size Estimates by Name


This is a follow up to Use and Modify.

To make it even easier to work with your dinosaur size estimation functions you decide to create a function that lets you specify which dinosaur group you need to estimate the size of by name and then have the function automatically choose the right parameters.

Create a new function get_mass_from_length_by_name() that takes two arguments, the length and the name of the dinosaur group. Inside this function use if/else if/else statements to check to see if the name is one of the following values and if so set a and b to the appropriate values.

Once the function has assigned a and b have it run get_mass_from_length() with the appropriate values and return the estimated mass.

Run the function for:

  1. A Stegosauria that is 10 meters long.
  2. A Theropoda that is 8 meters long.
  3. A Sauropoda that is 12 meters long.

Challenge (optional): If the name doesn’t match any of these values have the function return NA and print out a message that it doesn’t know how to convert that group.

[click here for output]