Chapter 3 Definitions

Abstraction: The ability to ignore details of parts to focus attention on a higher level of a problem.

Modularization: The process of dividing a whole into well-defined parts, which can be built and examined separately, and which interact in well-defined ways.

Divide and Conquer: The technique where one divides problems up into manageable amounts.

Class Diagram: Shows the classes of an application and the relationships between them.

Object Diagram: Shows the objects and their relationships at one moment in time during the execution of an application.

Object Reference: Variables of object types store references to objects.

Overloading: A class may contain more than one constructor, or more than one method of the same name, as long as each has a distinctive set of parameter types.

Internal Method Call: When methods call other methods of the same class as part of their implementation.

External Method Call: When methods call other objects using dot notation.

Dot Notation: Object name, a dot, the method name, and parameters for the call.

Debugger: A software tool that helps in examining how an application executes. Can be used to find bugs.

Breakpoint: A flag attached to a line of source code that will stop the execution of a method at that point.