Use of 'new' for arrays in Java

Question

I've been undertaking some basic tutorials. One of which has asked me to set up an array to hold the following string values:

Beyonce (f) David Bowie (m) Elvis Costello (m) Madonna (f) Elton John (m) Charles Aznavour (m) 

Write a program to loop round, count how many are male vocalists and how many are female, and display my answer in the console.

I managed to complete it, but the way I set up my array was different to the answer provided.

Mine is as follows:

String names[] = {"Beyonce (f)", "David Bowie (m)", "Elvis Costello (m)", "Madonna (f)", "Elton John (m)", "Charles Aznavour (m)"}; 

And the provided answer is as such:

String[] singers = new String[6]; singers[0] = "Beyonce (f)"; singers[1] = "David Bowie (m)"; singers[2] = "Elvis Costello (m)"; singers[3] = "Madonna (f)"; singers[4] = "Elton John (m)"; singers[5] = "Charles Aznavour (m)"; 

Should I be creating a "new" array? If so, why? And what is the difference between the two?

Answer 1

Your answer is equivalent but more readable and less error-prone because you don't need any "magic numbers" for each array element with the "fear" of accessing an element out of the array definition and therefore creating an IndexOutOfBoundsException.