The Object-Oriented Concept |
| Humans have been classifying things into "Objects" since
the dawn of history because it is our natural tendency to do so. Computer
languages that are oriented with these Object-Oriented Concepts tap into
this natural human tendency resulting in an easy to understand and use language. Every programmer knows that ten small programs are easier to debug that one program that is ten times larger. Several advancements have been made towards this concept. Subroutines, Sub-functions and now Objects. Object-Oriented programming will not, to be honest, live up to all the hype that you may have heard. If you think it will make all programming automatic, and all problems and bugs a thing of the past, you’ll be disappointed. Object-Oriented programming is, however, a significant advancement, and every programmer, that gains an understanding of Object-orientation, will become better and more productive.
Using an automobile as an example of an Object, the following program shows an example of Object Oriented programming BobsCar.Speed = 50 As shown in the example, the overwhelming complexity of Bob's car is
reduced down to a simple set of understandable terms. |
An
automobile is a very good example of the Object-Oriented Concept. As humans,
it is our natural tendency to think of an automobile as a single "thing",
and not as a large group of several thousand small "things". Thinking of
the automobile as a single "thing" helps us deal with the overwhelming complexity
of the whole machine. We would say simple statements like; "Fill her up."
or "How fast are we going?" or "I have a Blue car." ... and everyone would
understand how those statements apply to our car. In Object-Oriented terminology, collecting together a large group of several thousand small "things" into one single "thing" called an automobile is called encapsulation. Once encapsulated, the individual components within an object are dedicated to that one object. As in the above example, both automobile objects have a Speed property. Even though the property has the same name, each refers to its own object. It should also be noted that each instance of the objects work continuously and simultaneously in the background just as the cars do in the example.
The OOP in OOPic |
| Any one who has programmed Embedded Controllers knows how complex they
can get. OOPic eliminates this problem by encapsulating all the components
of Microchip's
PICmicro®, embedded controller's hardware circuits into Objects. During
program development, these objects can be named appropriately and then used
with simplified statements like Motor1.Speed = 50.
The OOPic has a large library
Objects, each with a different predefined function. Multitasking
in an Embedded Controller is also a daunting challenge. OOPic
gracefully handles the multitasking issues by handling the processing requirements
of each object in a cooperative multitasking arrangement. For more information on OOP, see Chapter 6 of the Programmer's Guide. |
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