The Object-Oriented Thought Process, Fourth Edition

The Name of the Class

The name of the class is important for several reasons. The obvious reason is to identify the class itself. Beyond simple identification, the name must be descriptive. The choice of a name is important because it provides information about what the class does and how it interacts within larger systems.

The name is also important when considering language constraints. For example, in Java, the public class name must be the same as the filename. If these names do not match, the application won’t work.

Figure 4.1 shows the class that will be examined. Plain and simple, the name of the class in our example, Cabbie, is the name located after the keyword class:

public class Cabbie {}

Figure 4.1. Our sample class.

Using Java ...