Question

i’m working on a virtual village project that is like this. there are 50 men and 50 woman they age and randomly marry with someone, they have kids and when they reach 80 they start to die.
i have a abstract c# class called human:

abstract class Human
{
    enum GenderType { Male, Female };

    int Age;
    bool Alive;
    string Name;
    GenderType Gender;

    Human Father;
    Human Mother;
    Human Partner;
    Human[] Children;

    public abstract bool Check(ref List<Human> People, int Index);
}

and two child from Human class called Man and Woman. My question is how can i override Check method in Man/Woman class to be able to detect female/male relatives that is illegal to marry with. for example Mother, sisters, aunts, sisters in law, mothers in law and so on.

Answer 1

Personally I would add helper properties to the base class for the different relationships. Makes the high-level code really easy to follow. You just add new helpers/properties for different relationships as you need them.

Something like this:

public class Human
{
    ...
    public List<Human> Parents
    {
        get {return new List<Human>(){Mother, Father};}
    }

    public List<Human> Siblings
    {
        get
        {
            List<Human> siblings = new List<Human>();
            foreach (var parent in Parents)
            {
                siblings.AddRange(parent.Children);
            }
            return siblings;
        }
    }
}

public class Man : Human
{
    public override bool Check(ref List<Human> People, int Index)
    {
        // Do basic checks first
        if (!base.Check(People, Index))
        {
            return false;
        }
        var person = People[Index];
        // Can't marry your mother/father
        if (this.Parents.Contains(person)
        {
             return false;
        }
        // Can't marry your sister/brother
        if (this.Siblings.Contains(person))
        {
             return false;
        }
        // ... etc for other relationships
        return true;   /// Not rejected... yes you can marry them... (if they want to!)
    }
}

I would also put the basic checks, that apply to both male and female, in the Human class and call the base check from the Male and Female checks first (as now shown in code above).

public class Human
{
    public virtual bool Check(ref List<Human> People, int Index)
    {
        var person = People[Index];
        // Can't marry yourself!
        if (this == person)
        { 
             return false;
        }
        if (this.Gender == person.Gender)
        {
             return false;  // Unless the village is New York or Brighton :)
        }
        if (!person.Alive)
        {
             return false;  // Unless vampires/zombies are allowed
        }
        if (Partner != null)
        {
             return false;  // Unless village supports bigamy/poligamy in which case use a collection for Partner and rename to Partners.
        }
    }
}

I think you will find that most checks apply equally to Male and Female, as the same-sex checking happens early on, so most checks will probably go into the base class Check.

Note: Yes, you can do a lot of this using yield return instead of lists, but you also need to take into account the target audience 🙂