Am 13.09.2007 um 09:06 schrieb Mathieu Bouchard:
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.
Hmmm, i can follow your reasing, but i guess noone would say "class
of cats" when he/she means cats in general. That would be "objects"
for pd then, not "class".
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".
For abstractions, the word is "abstraction". An abstraction in turn
contains objects that may be of type "message", "sub patch",
"abstraction" or "external/binary object".
I always use "external object" to mean an object that can't be opened
as a patch. That worked quite well so far, although i'm interested in
more correct formulations without complicating things.
gr~~~