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

Mathieu Bouchard matju at artengine.ca
Thu Sep 13 03:13:56 CEST 2007


On Wed, 12 Sep 2007, Roman Haefeli wrote:

> how about naming the 'class' 'objectclass' instead?
> although you are probably right, marius, that most of the pd users do
> not know the term 'class', they'd probably understand 'objectclass'.

I often write "object class" in the context of pd precisely because the pd 
documentation eschews the "class" word and that almost every teacher does 
the same. Everybody else in almost any OO programming language knows what 
"class" means.

Just be careful not to say "class object", which is a different concept. 
pd doesn't have those, but it could. This is an object representing a 
class. It could also be called "object class object".

> differentiation between a [dac~] and the 'dac~' in general is quite
> important.

There are further distinctions between the class vs the class name, the 
class vs the creator, and the creator vs the creator name... If you want, 
I could show you. In practice, "class" is not really the thing that 
matters from a user's point of view; the "creator name" is the only thing 
actually seen... but almost all of the time, you can avoid making the 
difference. Those further distinctions are not as useful as 
class-vs-object.

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal QC Canada


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