[dishman]

Who has an example of abstraction in real life?

Would construction workers building a house be a good example?
Some workers can work simultaneously on different tasks and some require one task to be done before they can do their task.

How does that sound?

Does any one have a better example?

[molsen]

umm..no i don't think that's abstraction at all. what's the definition you have of abstraction? what is the context in which you are learning this term?

various definitions of abstraction in general use:

the act of considering something as a general quality or characteristic

example: you can consider a guy's massive weight and his habit for eating fast food every day and abstract that he is unhealthy, for a specific intent or purpose.

an impractical idea; something visionary and unrealistic.

can also mean to physically abstract something:

the act of taking away or separating; withdrawal

secret removal, esp. theft.

here's a pretty good wiki on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction

which is it?

[dishman]

here is the prompt i am reading for a tutiorial im doing.

abstraction is an important concept in computer schence. Much of a computers orginization and system layout is based on the concept of abstraction.

what is an abstraction? that is, what does the word mean in the context of a computer system?

give two examples of abstraction in everyday life.

I thought it was when a computer devided tasks to complete them.

[The General]

You mean like HAL? The Hardware Abstraction Layer?

[HAVOC]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_(programming)

WIKI IS YOUR FRIEND.

[molsen]

in the context of a computer system, it would mean reducing details so you can focus on a few things at a time.

i don't see any other real world application to this for other than computer systems. dividing up tasks in everyday life is not called abstraction....but i guess if the tutorial is asking for some sort of an analogy to it, the construction example works O.K.

This would be where my help ends as computer programming is a major that I pursued for only half a semester.