Data structures and OOP
Data structures, also known as complex data types, are type abstractions o manipulate data in expecific ways that the primitive data types don't allow.
Data structures can hold a huge ammount of primmitives, other data structures and even functinons, allowing it to be a powerfull and rich tool for data storage, organization and encapsulation.
Structures
Structures are the way of how you can declarate a new data type in the Abstract language. In it, you can organize collections of primitives, privatize certain variables in closed scopes, abstract the management of huge amonts of data, and go on.
A example of a structure being declarated and used in Abstract is:
struct Biography {
@public let u8 myAge
@public let string myName
@public let string myGithub
}
# this is creating a new variable of type Biography!
let Biography myBio = new Biography();
myBio.myAge = 17
myBio.myName = "Camila"
myBio.myGithub = "lumi2021"
The structure Biography on the example have 3 fields, an integer myAge and two strings myName and myGithub.
The resulting size of this structure, in memory, will be, in most cases, the sum of all fields plus a aditional
constant pointer that indicates it type in a global type table. This implicit data is important to allow the program
to know the type of the structure anywhere during runtime.
Constructors
Sometimes, is usefull to have a single function to abstract complex initialization of data. for instance, take the following structure declaration example:
struct Biography {
@public let string name
@public let string github
@public let u8 birthYear
@public let u8 age
}
To initialize this structure, the following code:
# Declarating the variable and creating the instance...
let Biography myBio = new Biography();
# Defining the initial data ...
myBio.name = "Camila"
myBio.github = "lumi2021"
myBio.age = 17
myBio.birthYear = 2007
To make life easyer, the language allows to declarate a special function that will be called automatically when the structure is initialized, called constructor. The constructor can accept parameters, read and set variables and run code as any function can do.
A constructor can be declarated as follows:
struct Biography {
...
constructor() {
# This will run when the structure is instantiated!
}
}
As it need some input data, the constructor will ask for some arguments:
struct Biography {
...
constructor(string name, string gh, u8 age) {
# This will run when the structure is instantiated!
}
}
When a constructor is declarated on the structure, to instantiate it, will be required to match the parameters of one of the declarated constructors (it includes empty constructors).
after that, we can process the data how we want:
struct Biography {
...
constructor(string name, string gh, string age) {
# `this` is used to get the current instance.
# it should be used in case of naming conflict.
# Oterwise, it's unecessary.
this.name = name;
github = gh;
this.age = age;
birthday = 2024 - age;
}
}
Static Functions and Methods
Object-Oriented Programming
Object-Oriended Programming in a programming paradigm that uses objects concept to develop programs. Even Abstract being mainly based on procedural programming paradigm, Object-Orientation can be implemented using structures.
In OOP, a object is refered as a structure that includes fields and precesses, like functions. Also, the object-orientation have 3 important concepts that objects need to be able to follow.