Object oriented programming

GNU/Octave has support for object oriented programming. Below you can find some tips and tricks.

Making all fields public

Fields of an Octave object are by default private. This means that only methods of the object can access the field directly. For a user to access a given field directly, a method must be provided (sometimes called a getter method). If such methods is not provided, a user cannot retrieve the contents of the field. There is a work around: we can get the internal structure representing and object and from there access all the fields. The next example creates a ftp object and retrieves all the fields

Code: Retrieving underlying structure an object

an_object = ftp("ftp.gnu.org/gnu/");
structure = struct(an_object);

From there you can get the contents of any of the fields. Although effective, this is not very elegant. The second option, and without destroying the object oriented philosophy is to provide a general get method. Find below a working example

Code: A general get method

function answ = get (obj,varargin)

  accepted = fieldnames (obj);

  tf = ismember (tolower (accepted), tolower (varargin));

  retrieve = {accepted{tf}};
  n = numel (retrieve);
  if n == 1
    answ = obj.(retrieve{1});
  else
    for i=1:n
      answ.(retrieve{i}) = obj.(retrieve{i});
    end
  end

  unknown = {varargin{!ismember (varargin,accepted)}};
  cellfun (@(x) warning ("Unknown field %s\n", x) , unknown);

endfunction

Any object with this method has all the fields accessible by the user. They only need to know the name of the field and they can retrieve it. This method effectively makes all the fields of your object public.

Packages using object oriented programming

Control
Geometry
Quaternion

Object oriented programming

Making all fields public

Packages using object oriented programming

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