[Tutor] a strange(r's) question

[dman]

On Sun, Oct 21, 2001 at 12:17:02PM -0500, Chris Keelan wrote:
| On Sat, 20 Oct 2001, dman wrote:
| | It is an exercise in architecture more than implementation.  
| 
| When you say "architecture" are you using it in the same sense as "program 
| design" 

Yes.  I'm a "Software Engineering" major.  Architectures differ from
Design Patterns in that architectures are a higher level overview of
how modules (in a general, not python-specific sense) interact with
each other.  Design patterns are patterns for how the internals of a
module are designed.

Design patterns are well explained in the "Gang of Four" book "Design
Patterns" published by Addison Wesley.  A highly recommended book.
The textbook for this class is "Software Engineering in Practice" by
Len Bass, Paul Clements and Rick Kazman.  It is also published by
Addison-Wesley.

If you want more information on this course (titled "Principles of
Software Architecture") see
    http://www.se.rit.edu/~se440/


An example of what I was refering to above :
    We have to include support for other network protcols such as MS
    Exchange in the architecture, but we don't have to include that in
    the implementation.  We have to show, in our presentations, how it
    would be easy to add (for example) Exchange support to the
    implementation because the architecture supports it.

| or in the hardware sense of "x86"? 

Hardware has an architecture (the high-level design for how the
processor will work), though those are necessarily different from
software architectures.

-D