pure virtual
in front of it
(which seems obvious to me!), but by putting = 0
after it. But
don't worry, if we come across them, we'll help you through.)
A lot of us have problems with communication. For example, I have good WWW access at work although I cannot run any MOO client other than telnet. However, at home (when I expect to do most of my interactive MOO work) I don't have access to Mosaic or any other WWW browser. Nor can I access the e-mail which you might send me at ggr.co.uk. I'm sure many others of you have 'split personalities' of different types which make this harder.
Marcus and colleagues have worked extremely hard and successfully to build a MOO environment which can be used for teaching. I'm a great believer in the MOO concept (which came from Xerox parc where the OO language Smalltalk also came from). But the text-based interface takes a fair amount of time to get used to and isn't always intuitive. However, if we don't expect too much from it, it will be extremely valuable to the course.
Don't expect the consultants to be C++ whizzes. Most of us are self-taught (a virtue, but not always efficient). But we learnt when the language was younger, and may have picked up the odd bit of bad style. We're not all computer scientists, so that sometimes we may not tackle a complex problem in the 'best' way. I'd feel very happy if, at the end of the course, I'd helped one or two of you to become a lot better than me! If we don't know something, we'll admit it openly!
We haven't yet set up a listserver, and the MOO itself isn't very good (IMO) for technical discussions. I think we would benefit enormously from a discussion group, with reasonably carefully managed threads, and it doesn't have to be located in the MOO! I'm sure we'd be delighted if one of you volunteered to set up a listserver for us!
I have written a set of classes for collaborative scientific computation which you are very welcome to browse through or download. I hope they give an idea of what a partially complete class library looks like, even if you don't understand some of the discipline.
Molecule
because it's impossible.
It would require the whole of chemistry to be included! Physicists and
mathematicians will argue about whether Points
and
Vectors
are different or not. So I think what we can offer is
constructive discussion of areas where OOD is important, and to get the
feedback from the rest of the class. Always remember that you are writing
systems in which humans matter!