This week, our team worked on quite a difficult assignment, in my opinion, which embraced two out of the three cornerstone principles of object-oriented programming: polymorphism and inheritance.
Polymorphism, like the Greek roots its based on, roughly means "many forms" in English. This allows programmers to write code that is an interface for different data types, while in most cases achieving the same functionality. Consider a theoretical Shape class and all the classes that can inherit from it, such as the Circle, Square, Triangle, and Pentagon classes. All of these shapes have different numbers of points, lines, and algorithms used to draw them. However, by making each class combine its own data and code within the Shape class, a programmer could write a draw() method/function, and another program calling this draw() function could get the correct shape depending on the parameters used. Thus, this theoretical draw() method could have many forms, which is the defining characteristic of polymorphism.
We also worked with interfaces and incorporated one into our program this week for the first time in this class. A major difference between an interface is an abstract class is that an abstract class can implement functionality code-wise, while an interface only provides definitions for functionality. If you try to give a method header in an interface a body, every (properly working) Java IDE/compiler will spit out an error. However, abstract classes can do things such as implement constructors and lay out basic functions, something you can't do in an interface.
Writing the barcode scanner was a tougher assignment than our group expected because getting 2D array traversal whilst checking out of bounds errors and converting string chars to ASCII codes initially was difficult to get right on their own, more so working together as a final program. However, we managed to get it done and working as intended, and I am proud of my team's work and our results.
Polymorphism, like the Greek roots its based on, roughly means "many forms" in English. This allows programmers to write code that is an interface for different data types, while in most cases achieving the same functionality. Consider a theoretical Shape class and all the classes that can inherit from it, such as the Circle, Square, Triangle, and Pentagon classes. All of these shapes have different numbers of points, lines, and algorithms used to draw them. However, by making each class combine its own data and code within the Shape class, a programmer could write a draw() method/function, and another program calling this draw() function could get the correct shape depending on the parameters used. Thus, this theoretical draw() method could have many forms, which is the defining characteristic of polymorphism.
We also worked with interfaces and incorporated one into our program this week for the first time in this class. A major difference between an interface is an abstract class is that an abstract class can implement functionality code-wise, while an interface only provides definitions for functionality. If you try to give a method header in an interface a body, every (properly working) Java IDE/compiler will spit out an error. However, abstract classes can do things such as implement constructors and lay out basic functions, something you can't do in an interface.
Writing the barcode scanner was a tougher assignment than our group expected because getting 2D array traversal whilst checking out of bounds errors and converting string chars to ASCII codes initially was difficult to get right on their own, more so working together as a final program. However, we managed to get it done and working as intended, and I am proud of my team's work and our results.
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