Help With Better Design

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

apollonius2 at gmail.com a écrit :
(snip)
>>> I would like to be able to get a good hold of the concept
>> state machines ?
> 
> Well both state machines and classes (objects).  That may be a bit of a
> tall order to take on all at once but the concepts seem to be quite
> related.

They are, since OO was born from the use of state machines for 
simulation (the Simula language). But you can do state machines with a 
database and a procedural language too, and FWIW, the "state machine" 
aspect of OO is more often very informal and ad hoc.

> I already have a great deal of material on Classes so good to
> go there.

Don't confuse "classes" with OO. The "OO" in OOP means 
"object-oriented", not class-oriented, and nothing in the most basics 
definitions of OO [1] requires nor even imply the notion of "class". 
This notion is mostly an artifact for easing the definition of a family 
of objects having similar implementation, and some 00 languages managed 
to get by without classes (look for "prototype-based languages" - the 
most known being javascript). wrt/ Python, classes are actually objects 
too, and instances have a reference to their class. Since one can 
dynamically modify the instance object -> class object relation at 
runtime, we're quite close to prototype-based languages !-)


[1] "an object is defined by an identity, a state and a behaviour."