Glossary - Java Software Solutions: Foundations of Program Design - page 656

operand— A value on which an operator per-
forms its function. For example, in the expres-
sion 5 + 2, the values 5 and 2 are operands.
operating system— The collection of programs
that provide the primary user interface to a
computer and manage its resources, such as
memory and the CPU.
operator— A symbol that represents a particu-
lar operation in a programming language, such
as the addition operator (+).
operator association— The order in which
operators within the same precedence level are
evaluated, either right to left or left to right. See
also operator precedence.
operator overloading— Assigning additional
meaning to an operator. Operator overload-
ing is not supported in Java, though method
overloading is.
operator precedence— The order in which oper-
ators are evaluated in an expression as specified
by a well- defined hierarchy.
order— The dominant term in an equation that
specifies the efficiency of an algorithm. For
example, selection sort is of order n 2 .
overflow— A problem that occurs when a data
value grows too large for its storage size, which
can result in inaccurate arithmetic processing.
See also underflow.
overloading— Assigning additional meaning to
a programming language construct, such as a
method or operator. Method overloading is sup-
ported by Java, but operator overloading is not.
overriding— The process of modifying the defi-
nition of an inherited method to suit the
purposes of the subclass. See also shadowing
variables.
package— A Java reserved word that is used to
specify a group of related classes.
package visibility— See default visibility.

panel— A graphical user interface (GUI) con-
tainer that holds and organizes other GUI
components.
parameter— (1) A value passed from a method
invocation to its definition. (2) The identifier
in a method definition that accepts the value
passed to it when the method is invoked. See
also actual parameter, formal parameter.
parameter list— The list of actual or formal
parameters to a method.
parent class— See superclass.
pass by reference— The process of passing a ref-
erence to a value into a method as the param-
eter. In Java, all objects are managed using
references, so an object's formal parameter is
an alias to the original. See also pass by value.
pass by value— The process of making a copy
of a value and passing the copy into a method.
Therefore, any change made to the value inside
the method is not reflected in the original value.
All Java primitive types are passed by value.
PDL— See Program Design Language.
peripheral— Any hardware device other than
the CPU or main memory.
persistence— The ability of an object to stay in
existence after the executing program that cre-
ates it terminates. See also serialize.
physical line of code— A line in a source code
file, terminated by a newline or similar charac-
ter. See also logical line of code.
pixel— A picture element. A digitized picture is
made up of many pixels.
place value— The value of each digit position
in a number, which determines the overall
contribution of that digit to the value. See also
number system.
pointer— A variable that can hold a memory
address. Instead of pointers, Java uses ref-
erences, which provide essentially the same