On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 7:52 PM, Ken Thomases <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> How can I build one class to handle both??? > > You sound very vexed by this question, but the answer seems self-evident to > me. You just do. It's totally up to you what your classes do and how you > use them. Nobody's standing in your way.
Surprisingly, this sort of problem comes up fairly frequently, where an inexperienced guy doesn't know where to start, and an experienced guy doesn't even see where the problem is. Just do it! He says. But how? Obviously the answer depends a lot on what you're trying to do. But in my opinion, the best generalized answer to this question is to "break it down". In other words, break your problem into sub-problems. Repeat on the sub-problems and their sub-problems and so forth until you're left with teeny little problems that you know how to solve directly. For more elaboration on this, see: http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?BreakItDown Of course this is not always a simple thing to do. You could convincingly argue that being able to "break it down" well is, in fact, what being a programmer really is. But in general I find that thinking explicitly about how to decompose my bigger problems into smaller problems, rather than thinking directly about how to solve my bigger problems, helps a great deal. In this case, the fundamental problem is that you have a bunch of duplicated code alongside a bunch of unique code, and this is obviously bad. How can you factor out that duplicated code into a single place? Two possibilities spring to mind: put it into a common superclass, or move it into a helper object. Each one of those can be broken down further. If you move it into a common superclass, you have to think about where that class would be in the hierarchy, what code it would contain, how it will communicate, etc. If you create a helper class, you'll have to create the interface for it, create notifications or delegate methods for it to talk back, etc. Each of these then decomposes further into smaller sub-problems. I hope this is helpful. This sort of generalized programming problem-solving skill takes some time to learn (and a lifetime to master), but this is, I think, the main guiding principle to work with. Mike _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
