Who could have predicted that a request for suggesting books on OOP can
come so far!
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 9:31 PM, lipska the kat <lipskathe...@yahoo.co.uk>wrote:
> On 08/08/12 17:42, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 08 Aug 2012 10:51:45 +0100, lipska the kat
>> <lipskathe...@yahoo.co.uk> declaimed the following in
>> gmane.comp.python.general:
>>
>>
>>> The point I'm obviously struggling to make is that words convey concepts
>>> The word Person conveys a whole lifetime of experience of People and as
>>> imperfect human beings many of us are unable to tease out 'bits of being
>>> a person' that are relevant to the system we are developing. Inevitably
>>> other seemingly irreversibly entwined bits keep popping up to cloud our
>>> thinking. This is my experience, not an isolated case but one that has
>>> popped up again and again.
>>>
>>> You've never considered writing a genealogy program, have you?
>> One
>> that never acknowledges "Person"?
>>
>> Before I start let me say that this thread really has been the most
> enormous fun and I can take any amount of ridicule so don't hold back.
>
> Normally when I have a bath I think of the best way to stop the mice from
> feasting on my herb patch without killing them. This evening I lay there
> thinking about this outwardly tricky problem when I realised that what we
> have here, at it's most basic, is a Tree.
>
> I am not a genealogy expert, the nearest I've been to a family tree is the
> ones my old mum thrusts under my nose at Christmas, Sunday lunch,
> birthdays,funerals etc etc . They are increasing large, beautifully hand
> drawn and most definitely a Tree
>
> So here is my off the cuff, in the bath design for a genealogy system
>
> A Tree consists of Node(s) and Leaf(s), relationships are modelled by
> following the Line(s) in the Tree diagram and that is it. Line may be a
> class as in 'the patriarchal line' I'm not sure, it would come out in the
> iterative wash.
>
> We can infer whatever we want from this simple model. A Leaf is a child,
> until it becomes a parent when it becomes a Node. To anthropomorphize a bit
> more (I love that word) and introduce non species specific words and
> concepts, a Node can be a father or mother (simple to implement by virtue
> of an enumeration e.g enum Gender{MALE, FEMALE, HERMAPHRODITE,
> NON_GENDER_SPECIFIC_CHIMERA, ...}) A male sibling of a parent is an uncle,
> a female an aunt and a cousin is ...I have no idea but hopefully you can
> see where I'm going with this. Furthermore our system can work for Horses
> and Dogs and Zoomorphs and Epiphytes, Parasites and Zygomorphs and Fungi
> and Parrots and anything else you can possibly think of ...
>
> But what of all the ephemeral data that goes with a sentient existance on
> this planet such as birth certificates, newspaper articles, christenings,
> death certificates, photographs etc etc, what about pegigree certificates,
> innoculation records and any other trivia, information and flotsam that
> goes with a pedigree Dog or Horse or indeed Parrot.
>
> Well you don't need me to answer this one do you, we could have a class
> called Ephemera ... but then I prefer the Just In Time concept to loading
> data, I'd store the gubbins in a 'database' (don't get me started on
> databases) or I may decide to pickle the data out to disk and pull it out
> when someone requests it and probably charge them a small fortune for the
> privilige of looking at their own families historical information.
>
> And not a 'Person' in sight
>
> Of course you may be a genealogy expert and just waiting to shoot me down
> in flames, go ahead, I'll have a good smile about it next time I'm in the
> bath.
>
> lipska
>
> --
> Lipska the Kat: Troll hunter, sandbox destroyer
> and farscape dreamer of Aeryn Sun
> --
> http://mail.python.org/**mailman/listinfo/python-list<http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list>
>
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