What is an owning contact?

Question

While going through solidity documentation I came across a term 'the owning contract' which i didnt understand.

A contract in the sense of Solidity is a collection of code (its functions) and data (its state) that resides at a specific address on the Ethereum blockchain. The line uint storedData; declares a state variable called storedData of type uint (unsigned integer of 256 bits). You can think of it as a single slot in a database that can be queried and altered by calling functions of the code that manages the database. In the case of Ethereum, this is always the owning contract. And in this case, the functions set and get can be used to modify or retrieve the value of the variable.

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 15 '18 at 17:54

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By 'the owning contract' they mean the contract that owns the aforementioned 'single slot in a database', which in their example is the storedData variable.

Contract code can only modify the state variables of the contract it's running in.

answered Jan 15 '18 at 17:54

Jesbus

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 17 '18 at 05:06

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The owning contract has the right to modify the code. Ether are mined and used to compile the contract. An address is then produced (representing the contract) that sits in the blockchain.

answered Jan 17 '18 at 05:06

cheese 14

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modify the code - clarify? Can the code be modified after the address has been generated? – Tushar Choudhary Jan 17 '18 at 05:22
clarification – Tushar Choudhary Jan 17 '18 at 12:07
A contract once deployed to the blockchain (that is, a contract with an address) cannot be changed. However there are some recent ways to do so according to this: https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/2404/upgradeable-smart-contracts – cheese 14 Jan 17 '18 at 15:55

What is an owning contact?

2 Answers2