The BFOIT Introduction to Programming Class
Appendix A (Jargon)
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A

abstraction

The world is full of stuff with names that can be described in incredible detail.  But when you see or hear the name of something, if you know what it is, you immediately can imagine it - in some general form.  As an example, when you see or hear the word: tree you picture a trunk and branches.  Trees come with bark in a variety of colors, they have leaves that come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, or maybe needles, they may have fruit, they can be short or tall, its wood can be classified as soft or hard, etc...

Your initial thoughts were an abstraction of what a tree is.  The details didn't matter, at least not initially.

In computer programming, you will be building programs from modular pieces.  You are going to give the pieces names that are descriptive of what they are or do.  These names are abstractions and will be used as such. 

For example, if you write a drawing program, you will probably write procedures which draw objects, e.g., drawHouse, drawTree, drawCloud, etc...  With these procedures properly written, they can be used without thinking about how they do what they claim to do. 

In summary, a good abstraction is descriptive enough for you to imagine what you are working with, but specifies as little detail as possible.

applet

An applet is a Java program that is executed as part of a web page.  Instead of executing it from a DOS or a Unix command window with the "java" command, you put an <APPLET ...> section in the HTML that makes up your webpage.  As the browser interprets your HTML, it will find the <APPLET...> tag and startup your Java applet in its JVM (Java Virtual Machine). There's a JVM in ALL browsers!

argument

When you invoke a procedure in jLogo or a method in Java, you may need to provide arguments as part of the invocation.

When a procedure or method is declared to have/expect parameters, the invocation must include things, one for each expected parameter.  The things provided are called actual arguments.  Think of an argument as some real thing that will be substituted for the parameters that were used in the method's declaration when the code is executed.

array

A collection of elements (things) in Java that are all of the same type.  The collection has one identifier (name) used to access any of its elements.

The trick is that an expression that results in a non-negative number, between zero (0) and the number of elements minus one, inclusive, identifies which element is being selected.  This expression is placed in square brackets, following the array's identifier.