Hi Joachim,
Thank you for your reply and for your ideas. I will reply to your
questions below.
Le 16/01/2019 à 10:25, jtuc...@objektfabrik.de a écrit :
Loïc,
Am I correct in assuming you are thinking about a model in which a
plant can have a growing and shrinking list of organs over time and
some of them even have (a growing list of) stages?
Yes, the plant can be seen as a growing and shrinking list of organs.
Very short list at the beginning, and becoming larger. Some organs can
fall (leaves, roots) or even be pruned (shoots in fruit trees), so that
shrinking can also occur.
However, the list of stages for each organ is usually known at the
beginning, for each type of organ. It depends of knowledge and level of
detail that we include in the model.
I am not an expert on the matter, but to me the stages idea sounds
good. It even allows for historic information (it was a bud from Date1
to Date2 and since then it is a flower). So transformation would be
adding a new Stage and "terminate" the previous one.
This can be an approach. But the conditions for passing from one stage
to another can be more complex and involve several aspects (age,
previous growth, pollination, etc) with a lot of code. So, if you keep
this code into the general "reproductive organ" class, you make a "fat
class" with a lot of tests. This was not recommended in the Pharo course
:-)
With this you can ask a plant about its current stage on the
reproductive front and maybe other organs as well at any point time.
This may be helpful if you want to build an animation of the plant's
development over time. You can have separate life cycles for each organ.
This is actually an objective of such models, to be able to get the
status of the whole plant, regarding the stages of organs.
Does the plant transform in the real world? I mean, is a cherry tree
still a cherry tree, even if it's not blooming any more and carries
fruit instead? So why transform the object in its abstract model?
The plant usually changes because of its development, but a cherry tree
remains a cherry tree ! And flowers are necessary steps to get fruits
! The idea was not to transform the whole plant, but each individual
organ that it carries.
Just a thought, maybe better ideas show up.
OK, thank you again
Loïc
Am 16.01.19 um 10:15 schrieb Loïc Pagès:
Dear Pharo users,
I develop software dedicated to the simulation of plant development
and 3D architecture.
In the past, I used Java, but I am very interested in translating
code in Pharo. I appreciated very much the language and the course.
I have a question for you all :
During plant development (ontogeny), new organs appear, that are
gradually tranformed. For example, a bud can make a flower, and then
a fruit.
Organs are conveniently modelled as classes. During the course, I
learned that it was better to make several classes (bud, flower,
fruit) instead of a "fat class" such as "reproductive organ" with
many attributes and stages (bud stage, flower stage, fruit stage). I
wonder how to transform an object into another one, to represent for
example the fact that the flower may become a fruit.
Maybe a naive question ?
Thanks for your lights !
Loïc
