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Unit 8: Structured Representation of Knowledge
useful when more than one programmer is contributing code to a project or when the goal is to Notes
reuse code between projects.
Advantages of Object-oriented Programming
Object-oriented programming is a style of programming that focuses on using objects to design
and build applications. Think of an object as a model of the concepts, processes, or things in the
real world that are meaningful to your application. For example, in a project management
application, you would have a status object, a cost object, and a client object among others. These
objects would work together (and with many other objects) to provide the functionality that you
want your project management application to have. Object-oriented programming is used to
develop many applications—simple and complex applications, business applications and games,
mobile and desktop applications. Developers choose to program in the object-oriented paradigm
because the proper use of objects makes it easier to build, maintain, and upgrade an application.
Also, developing an application with objects that have been tested increases the reliability of the
application.
Self Assessment
State whether the following statements are true or false:
11. Conceptual dependency theory is a model of natural language understanding used in
artificial intelligence systems.
12. Arrows indicate direction of independency.
8.7 Object and Classes
In programming terms, an object is a self-contained component that contains properties and
methods needed to make a certain type of data useful. An object’s properties are what it knows
and its methods are what it can do. The project management application mentioned above had
a status object, a cost object, and a client object, among others. One property of the status object
would be the current status of the project. The status object would have a method that could
update that status. The client object’s properties would include all of the important details about
the client and its methods would be able to change them. The cost object would have methods
necessary to calculate the project’s cost based on hours worked, hourly rate, materials cost, and
fees.
Self Assessment
State whether the following statements are true or false:
13. An object’s properties are what it knows and its methods are what it can not do.
14. One property of the status object would be the current status of the project.
8.8 Messages and Methods
In addition to providing the functionality of the application, methods ensure that an object’s
data is used appropriately by running checks for the specific type of data being used. They also
allow for the actual implementation of tasks to be hidden and for particular operations to be
standardized across different types of objects. You will learn more about these important
capabilities in Object-oriented concepts: Encapsulation. Objects are the fundamental building
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