TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
>I realize now that not everyone agrees on what the non-method data
>referenced within an object should be called. There are several choices, and
>some might be language specific biases:
>
> "Field" -- from my Java 2 Black Book manual
> "Property" -- from my Visual Basic manual
> "Value" -- I've seen other places
> "Variable" - some C++ programmers would say this
> "Attribute" -- in an abstract object-oriented design web page I saw
I'm going to shorten this by saying that in my own decade-plus experience
with Object Oriented programming and programmers, using either property or
attribute should get the point across to anyone with general knowledge of
O-O programming (i.e. if they've only used one odd language with O-O
features that called it something odd, they might need to think a
bit). Especially if the first few times you phrase it as something like "The
foo object's bar property" or "The Foo object's bar attribute" to emphasize
its association with an object (or substitute "instance" for "object" if
refering to a specific instance).
