Terminology

Terminology

To understand the majority of tutorials on this wiki, you will need to make yourself familiar with some terminology. This page lists basic terms used throughout the articles.

General things

sheet, element, component

These describe anything you can interact with or see on the screen, for example a Button or Container, and can be used interchangeably.

parent

A parent is the object that contains the one being referred to. You might say "remove the button from its parent".

Object-oriented Programming

These terms relate to object-oriented programming. It is very important to understand this section, since Sheets is an object-oriented framework.

instance

An instance is an object of a class.

property, variable, attribute

All these names refer to non-function variables of a class or instance. Throughout this wiki, we will stick with properties.

method

A method is a function that is used with instances and uses colon notation. An example method might be this:

Instance:setX( 5 )

constructor

A constructor is a method that is called when an instance is created. In Sheets, constructors are defined as methods with their name matching the name of their parent class. For example, the constructor of the class Button has the name Button, which means it is equivalent to Button:Button. Constructors are not meant to be called by user code, but instead are used internally by the class system.

static

A static variable or function is one that should be used with the class itself, rather than an instance. An example static function might be this:

Class.setCustomConstructor( constructor )

super class

A super class is one which another class inherits. See Inheritance Tutorial for more information.

subclass / child class

A subclass is one that extends another class. See Inheritance Tutorial for more information.