I am not a program designer by any means but I would really like to start getting a better grasp of how to do it and a better understanding of the .NET languages in general (VB, C#). I was reading a book by Wrox - Professional Visual Basic 2008. In it I believed it mentioned that Modules are slowly going out of existence. I can see why most coding would go into a class object but I would assume modules would always be necessary to at least keep the code clean.
Could anybody clarify this up for me? Also, I have been searching for a good source on software design but I can't seem to find any recent books published. I might be searching in the wrong places but I would really like to get my hands on one.
Thank you.
While in general they don't quite fit with OOP, they are still used and are required in some cases.
In VB.Net, if you wish to write extension methods, you are going to have to use a Module - The compiler will only allow Extension Methods to be defined in one.
You could of course get round not using Modules - an Non Inheritable Class with a private constructor and nothing but Shared Methods will achieved the same thing as a Module.
Like everything in programming (and many other things), they have their uses, and as long as they are not miss-used there is no problem with them. Right tool for the job!
The Module keyword in VB.NET primarily exists for compatibility with VB6 and earlier. Back then, most VB code was procedural with free-standing non-class Subs and Functions. The language acquired the Class keyword somewhere around VB4. Not true classes in the OOP sense, it didn't support inheritance. A feature missing from the underlying COM architecture.
It doesn't fit very well with the execution model provided by the CLR. There is no support for free functions, every method must be a member of a class. The VB.NET compiler emulates modules by declaring a class, the module procedures become Shared methods of that class. You can see this with Ildasm.exe:
.class private auto ansi sealed ConsoleApplication1.Module1
extends [mscorlib]System.Object
{
.custom instance void [Microsoft.VisualBasic]Microsoft.VisualBasic.CompilerServices.StandardModuleAttribute::.ctor() = ( 01 00 00 00 )
} // end of class ConsoleApplication1.Module1
Note how it is private, so that code can't get a reference to it, and sealed, so that no code can derive a class from a module.
The C# compiler does the exact same thing with a "static class", the CLR doesn't have a notion of static classes either. There are plenty of good reasons for static classes, the idea of "Module" isn't obsolete. You could accomplish the same by declaring a NotInheritable Class in VB.NET code, having only Shared methods. The VB.NET compiler however doesn't enforce methods to be Shared like the C# compiler does and doesn't allow you to declare the class private. As such, a Module is just fine.
Modules are the closest thing VB has to static classes, which can be very useful, even when programming in an object-oriented environment.
And since VB has no static classes, modules are as far as I know the only way to create extension methods.
You need modules in order to define your own Extension methods
Related
In many modern OOP languages, such as Java and C#, reference types have a base class typically called Object from which all other reference types inherit their core functionality.
These languages also have a universal .toString() method shared across all the reference types, so that it's easy to extract data as a string from it.
Now here's the question: If the String class is a subclass of Object, how can Object implement a .toString() method without causing a circular dependency?
if A uses B and B implements A it's bound to cause problems, or am I totally wrong in this?
Regarding C# (and I'm pretty sure the same goes for Java), the compiler doesn't require that source files be provided in dependency order.
This means that, unlike other compilers (the F# compiler and gcc, I believe), the C# compiler allows you to refer to symbols that haven't been seen by the compiler yet (as long as both types are in the same assembly).
In other words - yes, there's is a circular dependency, but the compiler takes care of that for you. If you want to know how compilers handle circular dependencies, then that has been asked on programmers.stackexchange already.
I'm programming Windows COM in C++ and I see that a lot of functions get prefixed with :: so that the global namespace version got called. Why is that?
I understand that there may be conflicts with namespaces, but does it happen so often in COM that everyone has become so paranoid that every single function now has to be resolved explicitly?
Here are some examples that I see often:
wStrLen = ::SysAllocStringLen(NULL, wStr);
::SysFreeString(str);
::CoTaskMemFree(item);
And many others.
It just puzzles me why the programmers chose to resolve namespace explicitly and why they didn't just write:
wStrLen = SysAllocStringLen(NULL, wStr);
SysFreeString(str);
CoTaskMemFree(item);
Any ideas?
No, that's not common in COM programming, not in any I wrote or studied anyway. COM itself adds few names to the global namespace, there are not that many helper functions. A common way to implement a COM interface is to use a C++ class, you can stick it in any namespace you like since it doesn't get exposed at all outside of the module. I suspect that it is just something the team whose code you saw preferred. If you saw it in a book then that's a good way to increase the odds that the book code sample can drop into an existing program without too much trouble. There's otherwise nothing wrong with it.
It's common in a lot of classes in JDK, just a few examples:
java.util.Properties
load0
store0
java.lang.Thread
start0
stop0
setPriority0
Usually they are private native methods (like in Thread class), but sometimes they are just private (Properties class)
I'm just curious if anybody know if there is any history behind that.
I believe they are named like that because equivalent functions with same names exist in the code and just to distinguish between native helper functions and public functions they decided to suffix them with 0.
in java.util.Properties both load, store and load0, store0 exist.
The 0 after the method name is done so to distinguish between public and private methods having same name .
Start function will call the start0 function.
Those functions which ends with 0 is private method.
And those which are not ending with number is public.
You can check in any of the library.
The use of zero suffixes on method names is just a convention to deal with cases where you have a public API method and a corresponding private method. In the Java SE libraries, this is commonly used for the native methods that provide the underlying functionality implemented by the classes. (You can see what is going on by looking at the OpenJDK source code.)
But your questions are:
Why some java methods in core libraries end with numbers?
Because someone thought it would be a good idea. It is not strictly necessary since they typically could have overloaded the public methods instead. And since the zero suffix matters are private, the naming of methods should not be relevant beyond the class and its native implementation.
I'm just curious if anybody know if there is any history behind that.
There is no mention of this convention in the original Java Style Guide. In fact, I think it predates Java. I vaguely recall seeing it in C libraries in 4.x BSD Unix. That was the mid 1980's. And I wouldn't be surprised if they adopted it from somewhere else.
Some of my co-workers make extensive use of the VB.net concept of Modules. Unfortunately, I just don't 'get it'. I see no benefit in using modules over shared classes. Am I missing something? When would it be preferable to use a module? Or am I (as I do quite often in this language) 'just not getting it'?
In VB.net a module is a shared class. When they are compiled they are given a private constructor and methods set to shared.
There are some times when you are forced to use modules by the compiler (in the same way static classes are in C#) such as for extension methods which can not be created in side a VB.Net class.
By using modules for your helper methods you will make it easier to convert them over to extension methods later and restrict others from adding any instance methods or constructors.
That said they are a hang over from VB6 that did not support full OO programming and beyond standalone helper methods they would not widely be used.
A module is essentially the same as a shared class. The major difference is that in a module, there's no need for all the extra "shared"s, cause everything's implicitly shared. If you have no instance data and are just using the class as a kind of namespace for functions, then it's a better idea (IMO) to use a module instead and make that clear.
I have a Util module in my VB.NET program that has project-wide methods such as logging and property parsing. The general practice where I work seems to be to call these methods directly without prefixing them with Util. When I was new to VB, it took me a while to figure out where these methods/functions were coming from. As I use my own Util methods now, I can't help thinking that it's a lot clearer and more understandable to add Util. before each method call (you know immediately that it's user-defined but not within the current class, and where to find it), and is hardly even longer. What's the general practice when calling procedures/functions of VB modules? Should we prefix them with the module name or not?
Intellisense (and "Goto Definition") should make it trivial to find where things are located, but I always preface the calls with a better namespace, just for clarity of reading. Then it's clear that it's a custom function, and not something built in or local to the class you're working with.
Maybe there's a subtle difference I'm missing, but I tend to use shared classes instead of modules for any code that's common and self-contained - it just seems easier to keep track of for me, and it would also enforce your rule of prefacing it, since you can't just call it from everywhere without giving a namespace to call it from.
I usually put the complete namespace for a shared function, for readibility.
Call MyNameSpace.Utils.MySharedFunction()
Util is such a generic name.
Example from the .Net framework. You have System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlEncode(...). Usually you refer to this as HttpUtility.UrlEncode since you have an import statement at the top.
The name of the class which has the static utility methods should be readable and explainable. That is good practice. If you have good class names they might just as well reside in a Utils namespace, but the class name should not be Utils.
Put all your logging in a Logger class. All your string handing in a StringUtils class etc. And try to keep the class names as specific as possible, and I'd rather have more classes with fewer functions than the other way around.