Converting Applications to OOP Paradigm

Etch-a-Sketch

Since the etch-a-sketch was a simple program it was quite easy to convert it into an object-oriented structure. I decided to create one class that holds all functionality of the virtual etch-a-sketch. Though this sketch was originally created to controlled by the physical computing interface (consisting of two potentiometers) I have added the functionality to be able to use it with the arrow keys.

Here is a link to the Virtual Etch-a-Sketch app.

NYT Lists

I had issues trying to create a single NYT list object that could handle both types of list that I want to use in this sketch. Therefore, the solution that I decided to pursue was to create a parent class that includes some fully defined functions – the ones I was able to abstract to work with both lists – and two function shells – meant to be defined in the child classes. Here are a few lessons from my work on converting this sketch.

Notes on Using Inheritance

Learned that if you re-declare any variables then the functions that were declared in the parent class, which use the originally declared variable, won’t be able to update the newly declared version of that variable. The reason why I want to re-declare a variable is that it is an array, and each child classes features a different number of elements that will be stored in this array.

In the parent class I created a few functions that cycle through this array, and they seem to work. The problem is that when a function that is defined in the child class attempts to access this variable then the values, which had been updated by functions from the parent classes, are re-initialized (I got 0’s).

The solution that I used for this problem was to make the size of the array in the parent object large enough to accommodate the largest possible array size requirements from the child classes (for the case of this sketch that number was 50). To read the data appropriately, the loops in the parent functions have been set to cycle until they reach a “number of list items” variable that is defined by the user when they create and declare the object.

Using Parameters Within a Function

At first I created several functions that used the input parameters as variables within the function itself.  Though this worked in several instances, I realized that on other occasions the input parameter variables became un-useable. Therefore, now I understand that it is important to create new variables that can hold the values of input parameter for later use and processing.

Here is a link to the NYT List sketch.