alice-teacher Export a person in Alice 3

[Vanderhyde, James]

Don, I see. That makes sense, although it is not what I want right now. I also think a lot of tutorials are not explaining this correctly. The textbook (Dann, Slater, Paoletti, Culyba) seems to be OK, though, because it talks about exporting the procedure code, not about exporting a class.

What’s weird about this feature to me, is that when you are working in Java and you use a library, you use the library’s hierarchy, and you can’t inject code into arbitrary points in the library. You can only extend their classes to do what you want. This is opposite what Alice 3 allows you to do: you do inject code into the hierarchy, and you can’t create your own classes. I was thinking of the Alice 3 gallery hierarchy like a Java class library, and it really isn’t.

James
—
James Vanderhyde
Associate Professor and Department Chair
Computer Science
Saint Xavier University
3700 W. 103rd St.
Chicago, IL 60655
773-298-3454

On Jan 14, 2020, at 6:18 AM, Donald Slater <don at alice.org<mailto:don at alice.org>> wrote:

James,
You are correct. The Export / Import is not true sub-classing in the Alice system. It is instead more of an export and merge new features into an existing class. It was decided by the team that this concept was better handled in the Alice - NetBeans curriculum - students import their projects into NetBeans where the Project is now a true Java project, with access to the entire Java Class Library and a inheritance would be better implemented.

All the best,
Don Slater

Alice Project

On Jan 13, 2020, at 3:39 PM, Vanderhyde, James <vanderhyde at sxu.edu<mailto:vanderhyde at sxu.edu>> wrote:

Don, thanks. One more question. It looks to me like you can’t export classes in Alice 3 at all. All you can do is customize existing classes, and export the customizations. You can’t create your own classes. For example, you can’t create one subclass of Fox called FancyFox and another subclass called FancierFox, two classes that do different things, so that some of your objects are FancyFoxes and some are FancierFoxes. Because when you import a class, or even instantiate a class from “My Classes” in the gallery, it does not create a new class; it just adds the custom methods, etc., to the built-in Fox class.

Or am I misunderstanding this?

James
—
James Vanderhyde
Associate Professor and Department Chair
Computer Science
Saint Xavier University
3700 W. 103rd St.
Chicago, IL 60655
773-298-3454

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