Lecture overview -- Keyboard shortcut: 'u'  Previous page: Phenomena and Concepts [Section] -- Keyboard shortcut: 'p'  Next page: Classification and exemplification -- Keyboard shortcut: 'n'  Lecture notes - all slides and notes together  slide -- Keyboard shortcut: 't'  Textbook -- Keyboard shortcut: 'v'  Help page about these notes  Alphabetic index  Course home  Page 14 : 22
Object-oriented Programming in C#
Introduction to Object-oriented Programming
Phenomena and Concepts

We will now study concepts and phenomena, in order to get inspiration and guidance to our understanding of classes and objects.

A phenomenon is a thing that has definite, individual existence in reality or in the mind. Anything real in itself.

A concept is a generalized idea of a collection of phenomena, based on knowledge of common properties of instances in the collection

These are the definitions of 'phenomenon' and 'concept'. I have taken these from the PhD thesis of Jørgen Lindskov Knudsen and Kristine Stougaard Thomsen, Aarhus University. The thesis was published in the mid eighties.

  • A Conceptual Framework for Programming Languages: Jørgen Lindskov Knudsen and Kristine Stougaard Thomsen, Department of Computer Science, Aarhus Universitet, PB-192, April 1985.
 

  • Characteristic aspects of concepts

    • The concept name

    • The intension: The collection of properties that characterize the phenomena in the extension of the concept

    • The extension: The collection of phenomena that is covered by the concept

A concept is characterized by its name, its intension (= characteristic properties), and its extension (= the phenomena covered by the concept).

Please pay attention to these words!