Introduction

Scrabble is a popular word game where players earn points based on the letters used in forming words. Each letter in Scrabble has a specific point value. In this tutorial, we will write a program in Go to calculate the score of a given Scrabble word.

The objective is to create a Go program that accepts a Scrabble word and computes its score based on the letter values as per the official Scrabble rules.

Code to Calculate Scrabble Word Score

            
package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "strings"
)

// Letter values according to Scrabble rules
var letterScores = map[rune]int{
    'A': 1, 'B': 3, 'C': 3, 'D': 2, 'E': 1, 'F': 4, 'G': 2, 'H': 4, 'I': 1,
    'J': 8, 'K': 5, 'L': 1, 'M': 3, 'N': 1, 'O': 1, 'P': 3, 'Q': 10, 'R': 1,
    'S': 1, 'T': 1, 'U': 1, 'V': 4, 'W': 4, 'X': 8, 'Y': 4, 'Z': 10,
}

func calculateScore(word string) int {
    word = strings.ToUpper(word) // Convert the word to uppercase
    score := 0
    for _, letter := range word {
        score += letterScores[letter]
    }
    return score
}

func main() {
    var word string
    fmt.Println("Enter a Scrabble word:")
    fmt.Scanln(&word)
    score := calculateScore(word)
    fmt.Printf("The Scrabble score for the word '%s' is: %d\n", word, score)
}
            
        

Explanation of the Program

This Go program works by using a map to store the Scrabble letter scores. Here’s a breakdown of the program:

• letterScores map: This map contains the point value for each letter in the alphabet as per Scrabble rules.
• calculateScore function: This function accepts a word, converts it to uppercase, and then calculates the total score by adding up the points for each letter in the word.
• main function: The user is prompted to input a word, which is then passed to the calculateScore function to compute the score. Finally, the result is printed to the console.

To run the program:

1. Install Go on your machine, if you haven’t already. You can download it from here.
2. Copy and paste the code into a file with a .go extension, for example, scrabble_score.go.
3. Open a terminal, navigate to the folder containing your scrabble_score.go file, and run the following command:

go run scrabble_score.go

4. Enter a word when prompted, and the program will display the Scrabble score for that word.