Functional lists
William R. Bitman · 1990
An important process of object-oriented engineering is the identification and definition of objects and classes.Operationally, there are three kinds of objects: fundamental, director, and design.Classes define traits of objects.For Management Information Systems (MIS), fundamental classes are abstractions of stored and displayed data referenced in the requirements.Director objects serve as the glue that combines objects to accomplish the requirements.Design classes are defined by analysts to further modularize the application, thereby reducing module complexity.This paper formulates the functional list design class.A functional list contains rules that determine whether an item belongs on a list.Fundamenta/list classes, in contrast, provide the mechanical manipulation operations of lists and list items.In many MIS systems, functional lists help organize code into reusable operations of low complexity.Functional lists are instantiations and often implemented as derived types, thus utilizing inheritance features.