245. Shortest Word Distance III

Given a list of words and two words word1 and word2, return the shortest distance between these two words in the list.
word1 and word2 may be the same and they represent two individual words in the list.
Example:
Assume that words = ["practice", "makes", "perfect", "coding", "makes"].
Input: word1 = “makes”, word2 = “coding”
Output: 1
Input: word1 = "makes", word2 = "makes"
Output: 3
Note:
You may assume word1 and word2 are both in the list.


// other’s code 
i1 and i2 are the indexes where word1 and word2 were last seen. Except if they're the same word, then i1 is the previous index.

public int shortestWordDistance(String[] words, String word1, String word2) {
    long dist = Integer.MAX_VALUE, i1 = dist, i2 = -dist;
    for (int i=0; i<words.length; i++) {
        if (words[i].equals(word1))
            i1 = i;
        if (words[i].equals(word2)) {
            if (word1.equals(word2))
                i1 = i2;
            i2 = i;
        }
        dist = Math.min(dist, Math.abs(i1 - i2));
    }
    return (int) dist;
}