menage

n : a social unit living together; "he moved his family to

Virginia"; "It was a good Christian household"; "I waited

until the whole house was asleep"; "the teacher asked how

many people made up his home" [syn: {family}, {household},

{house}, {home}]

message

In {object-oriented programming} sending a message to an

{object} (to invoke a {method}) is equivalent to calling a

{procedure} in traditional programming languages, except that

the actual code executed may only be selected at run-time

depending on the {class} of the object. Thus, in response to

the message "drawSelf", the method code invoked would be

different if the target object were a circle or a square.

(1995-02-16)