Software Engineering Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for professionals, academics, and students working within the systems development life cycle. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Been calling them "implementers", but it seems weird to me.
/// <summary>
/// Implementers should implement this. Derp
/// </summary>
protected abstract void InternalExecute();
A point of clarification, I'm interested in what to call the people who create child classes, not the child classes themselves.
"Hey, you there" not "that thing there."
MSDN class documentation often uses "you" to refer to developers.
When you inherit from WebRequest, you must override the following members...
You do not typically inherit from ButtonBase. To create your own button class, inherit from the Button, CheckBox, or RadioButton class....
You can also simply state what the requirements are for descendent classes. It is implied that developers are your audience.
Classes that inherit IDbConnection must implement all inherited members, and typically define additional members to add provider-specific functionality.
In your example, instead of "Implementers should implement this", write "Descendent classes must override InternalExecute to..." or "In descendent classes, you must override InternalExecute to...".
I usually say children, child classes or inheritors.
Its not that important; people are going to understand what you mean by Implementers anyway.
Descendants? (need couple more chars)
subclasses or classes that extend ThisInterfaceor classes that implement InternalExecute
You shouldn't mention the people who code in the doc, but how the base class should be extended, hence, you could call them "implementations"
ie
This base class defines the basic structure of the blah blah blah. Implementations should do XYZ to make it work....
Or
Implementations of this class should also consider...
You can call them extenders or subclassers.
I typically say child class. When talking about inheritance, implementers would be a little confusing to me because it makes me think that the class is implementing an Interface, which is different from class inheritance.
If I had to write documentation speaking directly to a person writing code that extends my base class, I would call them a Developer, End User, or Consumer.
That being said, I think it's generally a bad idea to reference the people using your code in the comments. Comments should state what the code does, not what the developer using it should be doing.
I want to offer an out-of-the-box idea: let's delete this comment altogether and then we don't have a problem how to phrase it.
The keyword abstract already says it all: one of the derived classes must implement the method. If that's the intent you want to communicate to the implementors of those derived classes, then you're already using this particular language element appropriately.
IE, users of the base class.
