Re: back to: improving rpg. was: what is object oriented programming

Booth Martin wrote:

Even the requests are helpful to the learning process.  The whole concept of
OO has never gotten through so these discussions are  helping to define the
concept to me.  What is the difference between OO and black boxing? As with
Date fields and adddur and subdur for example.  .It'd seem to me that adding
1 year, 2 months, and 6 days to February 27th and getting the correct answer
back even in a leap year is about as OO as one can get?

I think one problem is over the very definition of what OO is. You'll never really get a good definition of OO by looking at OO programming languages. For instance, compare specific languages: Some have multiple inheritance, others single inheritance. Some have compile-time type checking, others run-time. Some allow the overloading of operators, others not. And so on.

Regarding your specific example, that's really no different than adding 1 thousand 2 hundred and 6 to some number, which is clearly not OO.

Perhaps the term "OO" really is just a buzzword, like "AI"? That brings up a point I made in a previous point, the more you understand about OO, the less relevant specific OO language features seem to be. (At least, that's the case for me!) For arguments sake, perhaps the best indicator of "OO-ness" is its ability to support the implementation of design patterns, which fundamentally is what OO really is all about.

Which brings me back to my original point. Let's discuss specific RPG enhancements on their own particular merits, and not because they fit some definition of "OO".

Cheers! Hans