[PD] "object" or "class" in pdpedia

Mathieu Bouchard matju at artengine.ca
Thu Sep 13 09:06:28 CEST 2007


On Wed, 12 Sep 2007, Thomas Grill wrote:

> my vote is for object, although it's technically incorrect. Thinking of 
> my course next semester, i guess i would have a hard time explaining the 
> class/object difference to the students, most of who have no programming 
> experience at all.

It's a concept that they already know since they are very little. Many 
nouns refer to something that there can be many instances of and of which 
the noun acts as a class. Thus saying "the cat" refers to an individual, 
"the cats" refers to several individuals, "cats" (alone) refers to cats in 
general (class), and so does "all cats" and in another way "any cat" also 
does.

There must be a way to leverage that kind of intuition or knowledge.

> I tend to think that for pd this differentiation is not really an issue 
> outside external programming (which isn't targetted in this discussion).

do you teach abstractions? how do you do that without saying "class"? 
probably using a word that stands for "class".

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