Word Usage

Community
1

Okay…

I need someone with a technical background to help me with this sentence… It might seem stupid but it’s for a paper I’m writing for college. I asked my Written Communication instructor but he doesn’t know how to help me because he doesn’t understand what a “class” or “inheritance” means.

Here is the paragraph

The property ensures this field is encapsulated and exposes the field so it can be
seen by instances (or derivations) of the class. You’ll notice that the property
has the same name as the field, except it starts with a capital letter. It’s
not required that your property and field have the same name, however, its good
practice to do so, mainly because it makes your code more legible.

I am trying to say that the field can only be seen by INSTANCES OF or [B]ANYTHING DERIVED FROM (OR THAT INHERITS) THE CLASS.

[/B]Because of the way the property is scoped.

However, the word derivations means something completely different than what I thought it meant. So I used the dictionary to find another word to use and I came up with…

The property ensures this field is encapsulated and exposes the field so it can be
seen by instances (or progenies) of the class.

Which I guess means “children of”. But in this case it just sounds weird and I’m not sure if it’s correct.

Originally, I was thinking things that are derived from in other words deriv-a-tions. But that’s wrong. I’m not sure if there is a PLURAL word for Derived.

Hopefully, someone here can understand what I’m trying to say so I can reword the essay. We will lose 5% of our grade for everything we do wrong. So I don’t want to use the wrong word.

Classes B, C, D and E are all derived from Class A. So as a group, B, C, D and E are derivations of Class A. But this word means something else according to the dictionary.

2

You could use the word “derivative”. That means what you PROBABLY expect ‘derivation’ to be.

I would slightly rewrite this (personal taste) thus:

The property ensures this field is encapsulated, exposing it only through instances (or derivatives) of the class.

Secondly, I disagree with your statement that it is a good practice for a property to be named such that it matches the name of the class.
That can lead to confusion and errors (in mistyping based on the subtle difference only in case). But, that is irrelevant to your request for help.

3

Thanks. :slight_smile:

Also, I didn’t say it was good practice for the property to be named the same as the class. I only posted one short peice from the paper so it may have sounded like that. I’m not sure.

What I meant was that your property should have the same name as the variable is encapsulates.


string firstName
string lastName
string phoneNumber

FirstName (Get; Set;)
LastName (Get; Set;)
PhoneNumber (Get; Set;)
4

Forgive me if I misunderstood. As you said, it was out-of-context.

I am pleased my suggestion was helpful. I consider myself a person with technical expertise AND good language skills; in only ONE language, though.

5

Yea,

That was the word I was looking for. I’m not sure why I couldn’t come up with it. I guess sometimes my brain doesn’t work. But I don’t feel so bad because my instructor had no idea what word I was looking for either.