What is the difference between a "Method" and a "Class"?

Question

Hello all,

I've been wondering what's the difference between a method and a class.

I was doing a test and it asked me to create a class called BlogPost. My answer was:

public BlogPost {
}

I ended up getting the answer right.

Later on in the test, they identified a method called "main", which was typed out like this:

public static void main() {
}

From my experience with Java (which isn't much lol), "static" and "void" aren't required so the code can be typed out like this:

public main() {
}

So here's my question. What is the difference between a method and a class in terms of typing them out? The only difference I found is that methods have parenthesis whereas classes doesn't have anything.

Is that really the only difference between the two in terms of writing the code? A pair of parenthesis to pass through parameters?

Answer 1 · 2016-08-02T02:35:42Z

August 2, 2016 2:35am

I will start this response with 'In my understanding' and go from there... happy to be corrected. :)

Question 1. Difference between a Method and a Class.

They are quite different from each other. I think of a class as a construct, it has properties, initialisers and contains methods. A class is not called directly as you would a Method, but you would call Methods inside classes. In a game you may define a class of 'Monster'. This class would have properties like 'health', 'weapon', 'armour' etc, and may contain Methods like 'ReceiveDamage', 'DeathSequence' etc.

A method is initialised inside a class to do a sequence of events (possibly receiving values itself), like 'ReceiveDamage' might reduce health by a received value of damage. It may play 'hit' noise, check health is greater than 0 and if not then execute 'DeathSequence'. Another interesting definition is that outside of a Class, Methods are called Functions (I believe;).

Question 2. Coding difference.

Class

public class Monster {
  public int health;
  public string weapon;

  public Monster(int startHealth) {
    health = startHealth;
  }
}

Method

public ReceiveDamage(int damage) {
}

Answer 2 · 2016-08-02T01:41:27Z

August 2, 2016 1:41am

A class is a set of rules you write that govern an object. 

An object is what a class defines.

A method is a bit of code that can be called 

in JavaScript, which I know Java isn't...methods do things.  
JavaScript doesn't have class in the same way Java does
so I have nothing to add about that

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