Free Taking Stock by C J West Page B

system and the projects would be graded ruthlessly, but he guaranteed that any student who received an ‘A’ on the final project would get an ‘A’ for the course. This one criterion kept the students nervous and attentive except for Eric a. Her final project had been done for weeks, much of it modeled on her current client services project. She’d present a series of active pages that utilized sixteen SQL tables, a dozen forms, and provide the stringent security appropriate for a money management firm. This all but freed her from Dr. Eisenstein. Why she had come tonight, she wasn’t sure.
    The clack of the door latch drew every eye in the room to a young woman sheepishly slipping in toward the back. Her eyes found Eric a then she made her way along the back row and parked behind her.
    Eric a whispered a hello to Kate and went back to days of unread email.
    Eisenstein droned about the rampant abuses of proper style in the homework. He overemphasized the need for form and documentation to the point of absurdity. If he’d worked two days in industry he’d know that descriptive object and subroutine names and an observance of good structure made most code readable to a professional. The documentation he prattled on about was only necessary for peculiarities.
    The room fell strangely quiet. Eric a looked up from her laptop. Eisenstein stared directly at her from the front row. The entire class craned backward for a look.
    “Hello, Miss Fletcher. You come so infrequently I wouldn’t remember you had our previous exchanges not been so colorful. Are you going to surf the Internet for the entire lecture or will you be tuning in occasionally ? ”
    “I’m an excellent multi-tasker.”
    “We’ve noticed. So would you mind answering a simple question ? ”
    “Shoot.” She nearly returned to the email she was reading while he asked his question, but thought better of it.
    “It seems you missed our discussion of object inheritance last week. I assume you’ve done the reading. Could you tell me when you might use classes to define custom objects and when it would make sense to use inheritance from those objects.”
    Eisenstein assumed a confident pose waiting for her to fumble and then beg forgiveness. He stood ready to explain what she could not.
    Eric a grinned. “Have we covered classes ? Is everyone comfortable with what classes are and why they’re used ? ” Not one of the students nodded.
    “If you were here more often you’d know,” Eisenstein said.
    “I’m quite comfortable with classes and inheritance.”
    “Do tell.”
    “We use classes to define objects that we use over and over. In a production shop, you’ll have pre-defined classes that apply to your specific vertical industry. You won’t define these as a rookie programmer. Someone will hand you a listing that will guide you through what all the objects are.”
    Eisenstein was steamed that she addressed her response to the class rather than to him.
    “I work in financial services, so we have classes that apply to all sorts of financial objects. A mutual fund is a good example. We have an object called fund that carries certain basic information like the inception date, manager’s name, etcetera. We use inheritance to push these common attributes to various types of funds: stock funds, bond funds, index funds, what-have-you. Each different type of fund needs different types of information stored, but they all have the same basic information from the fund class. The benefit of inheritance is this: say we hire a new fund manager and his name is Thurston Montgomery-Wadsworth and our fund manager name is only twenty characters long. Because we used inheritance, we change the fund object and the change propagates down through all the various types of fund objects that derive from fund.
    “That’s how we use inheritance. Is that what you were looking for, Professor ? ”
    Eisenstein didn’t even look in her direction. He wandered behind the podium