[Bluej-discuss] How to call an accessor method in a different class?

[Bruce Barton]

I have to agree with Stephen on this one.  In an academic environment the key should be to help the students understand the concepts and not worry too much about efficiency or standard practice in industry.  They will have time to learn that in a course in Software Engineering.  In a first Java course they need to understand that fields and methods are always associated with object instances (or classes in the case of static fields and methods) and that the format is, as Stephen has described, object.field or object.method(args).  This gives the student one less "special case" to worry about (i.e., if the field or method is part of this class we can exclude the "this." in front of the field or method).  The goal in teaching is to foster understanding first and efficiency/common practice second.
 
Bruce Barton
Asst. Professor of Computer Science
Suffolk County Community College

________________________________

From: bluej-discuss-bounces at bluej.org on behalf of Aryeh M. Friedman
Sent: Sun 11/18/2007 10:54 AM
To: General discussion for users of BlueJ
Subject: Re: [Bluej-discuss] How to call an accessor method in a different class?



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>
> This might be a little easier if the first question or two had less
> magic in them -- in particular, the automatic "this" shortcut.  When
> I teach this stuff, I expect EVERY field reference to be of the form
> OBJECT.FIELDNAME, and EVERY method call to be of the form
> OBJECT.METHOD(ARGS); if the field or method is in the current object,
> my students are expected to use "this" explicitly as the OBJECT.
a) overkill?

b) teaches bad habits (i.e. non-standard style)

- --
Aryeh M. Friedman
Developer, not business, friendly
http://www.flosoft-systems.com <http://www.flosoft-systems.com/> 
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