Object-oriented programming
Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a computer programming paradigm that emphasizes the following aspects:
- Objectss - packaging data and functionality together into units within a running computer program; objectss are the basis of modularity and structure in an object-oriented computer program.
- Abstraction - The ability for a program to ignore some aspects of the information it's manipulating, i.e. the ability to focus on the essential.
- Encapsulation - The ability for the program to hide information about the implementation of a module from its users, i.e. the ability to prevent users from breaking the invariants of the program.
- Polymorphism - The ability of an entity to stand for different things based on its context of use.
- Inheritance - Defining classeses as extensions of existing classes.
Notes: Abstraction is important to but not unique to OOP. Reusability is a benefit often attributed to OOP.
OOP is often called a paradigm rather than a style or type of programming to emphasize the point that OOP can change the way software is developed, by changing the way that programmers and software engineers think about software.
The fundamental aspect of object-oriented programming is that a computer program is composed of a collection of individual units, or objects. To make the computation happen, each object is capable of receiving messages and sending messages to other objects. In this way, messages can be handled by one chunk of code but may be done so by another code block seamlessly. It is claimed then that this gives more flexibility over just step-by-step programming, called imperative programming or structured programming in the field of computer science. Thus, the challenge OOP programmers face is how to distribute responsibility over objects, or classes--one of many popular implementation schemes.
Proponents of OOP also claim that OOP is more intuitive and, for those new to computer programming, is easier to learn than a traditional way--breaking the computation into procedures. In OOP, objects are simple, self contained and easily identifiable. This modularity allows the program parts to correspond to real aspects of the problem and thereby to model the real world. Indeed, object-oriented programming often begins from a written statement of the problem situation. Then by a process of inserting objects or variables for nouns, methods for verbs and attributes for adjectives, a good start is made on a framework for a program that models, and deals with, that situation. This allows one to learn how to program in object-oriented languages.
The majority of the computer programmers agree that OOP is a major advance on the previous complexities of procedure based methods, as its popularity attests to the fact, and OOP can be a major advantage in large projects where procedural methods tended to develop very complicated conditional loops and branches, difficult to understand and to maintain.
In procedural languages, OOP often appears as a form where data types are extended to behave like an object in OOP, very similar to an abstract data type with an extension such as inheritance. Each method is actually a subprogram which is syntactically bound to a class.
The definitions of OOP are disputed. In the most general sense, object-oriented programming refers to the practice of viewing software primarily in terms of the "things" (objectss) it manipulates, rather than the actions it performs. Other paradigms such as functional and procedural programming focus primarily on the actions, with the objects being secondary considerations; in OOP, the situation is reversed.
OOP itself has been used to market many products and services and the actual definitions and benefits attributed to OOP have often been colored by commercial marketing goals. Similarly, many programming languages have a specific view to OOP that is less general in certain aspects from the more general definition.
Widely-used terminology distinguishes object-oriented programming from object-based. The former is held to include inheritance (described below), while the latter does not. See Dispute over the definition of object-oriented programming
The most popular and developed model of OOP is a class-based model, as opposed to an object-based model. In this model, objects are entities that combine both state (i.e., data) and behavior (i.e., procedures, or methodss). An object is defined by a class, which is a definition, or blueprint, of all objects of a specific type. An object must be explicitly created based on a class and an object thus created is considered to be an instance of that class. An object is similar to a structure, with the addition of method pointers, member access control, and an implicit data member which locates instances of the class (i.e.: actual objects of that class) in the class hierarchy (essential for runtime inheritance features).
Inheritance, (also inheritance (computer science) for the basic idea): One object's data and/or functionality may be based on those of other objects, from which the former object is said to inherit. This allows commonalities among different kinds of objects to be expressed once and reused multiple times. Inheritance is also commonly held to include subtyping, whereby one type of object is defined to be a more specialised version of another type (see Liskov substitution principle), though non-subtyping inheritance is also possible. Inheritance is typically expressed by describing classes of objects arranged in an inheritance hierarchy reflecting common behavior.
Class-based languages, or, to be more precise, typed languages, where subclassing is the only way of subtyping, have been criticized for mixing up implementations and interfaces--the essential principle in object-oriented programming. This website gives a good example. It says one might create a bag class that stores a collection of objects, then extends it to make a new class called a set class where the duplication of objects is eliminated. Now, a function that takes a bag class may expect that adding two objects increases the size of a bag by two, yet if one passes an object of a set class, then adding two objects may or may not increase the size of a bag by two. The problem arises precisely because subclassing implies subtyping even in the instances where the principle of subtyping, known as the Liskov Substitution Principle, does not hold.
Also, another common example is that a person object created from a child class cannot become an object of parent class because a child class and a parent class inherit a person class but class-based languages mostly do not allow to change the kind of class of the object at runtime.
Other than using classes, prototyping is another, less popular, means of achieving object-oriented behavior sharing. After an object is defined, another similar object will be defined by referring to the original one as a template, then listing the new objectÃÂÃÂs differences from the original. SELF, a programming language developed by Sun Microsystems is an instance of a language that uses prototyping for behavior sharing rather than classification. NewtonScript, Act1 and DELEGATION are other examples. Hybrid and Exemplars use both prototyping and classification. In prototyping systems, objects themselves are the templates, while classification systems use classes as templates for objects.
The classification approach is so predominant in OOP that many people would define objects as encapsulations that share data by classification and inheritance. However, the more generic term ÃÂÃÂbehavior sharingÃÂÃÂ acknowledges alternate techniques such as prototyping.
Object-based programming is centered around the creation of objects and their interactions, but may not have some of the key features of the class-based object-oriented paradigm such as inheritance. Some people regard OBP is not OOP.
In this model, no receiver is specified to send messages to objects. Instead, overloading is extensively used to determine which method should be executed at runtime.
There have been several attempts on formalizing the concepts used in object-oriented programming. The following concepts and constructs have been used as interpretations of OOP concepts:
The concept of objects and instances in computing had its first major breakthrough with Sketchpad made by Ivan Sutherland in 1963. However this was an application and not a programming paradigm. The object-oriented programming paradigm first took root in Simula 67, a language designed for making simulations, created by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard of the Norwegian Computing Centre in Oslo. (Reportedly, the story is that they were working on ship simulations, and were confounded by the combinatorial explosion of how the different attributes from different ships could affect one another. The idea occurred to group the different types of ships into different classes of objects, each class of objects being responsible for defining its own data and behavior.) They were later refined in Smalltalk, which was developed in Simula at Xerox PARC, but was designed to be a fully dynamic system in which objects could be created and modified "on the fly" rather than having a system based on static programs.
Object-oriented programming "took off" as the dominant programming methodology during the mid-1980s, largely due to the influence of C++, an extension of the C programming language. Its dominance was further cemented by the rising popularity of Graphical user interfaces, for which object-oriented programming is allegedly well-suited. Indeed, the rise of GUIs changed the user focus from the sequential instructions of text-based interfaces to the more dynamic manipulation of tangible components. An example of a closely related dynamic GUI library and OOP language can be found in the Cocoa frameworks on Mac OS X, written in Objective C, an object-oriented, dynamic messaging extension to C based on Smalltalk.
At ETH Zurich, Niklaus Wirth and his colleagues had also been investigating such topics as data abstraction and modular programming. Modula-2 included both, and their succeeding design, Oberon included a distinctive approach to object orientation, classes, and such. The approach is unlike Smalltalk, and very unlike C++.
Object-oriented features have been added to many existing languages during that time, including Ada, BASIC, Lisp, Pascal, and others. Adding these features to languages that were not initially designed for them often led to problems with compatibility and maintainability of code. "Pure" object-oriented languages, on the other hand, lacked features that many programmers had come to depend upon. To bridge this gap, many attempts have been made to create new languages based on object-oriented methods but allowing some procedural features in "safe" ways. Bertrand Meyer's Eiffel was an early and moderately successful language with those goals.
In the past decade Java has emerged in wide use partially because of its similarity to C language and to C++, but perhaps more importantly because if its implementation using a virtual machine that is intended to run code unchanged on many different platforms. This last feature has made it very attractive to larger development shops with heterogeneous environments. Microsoft's .NET initiative has a similar objective and includes/supports several new languages, or variants of older ones.
More recently, a number of languages have emerged that are primarily object-oriented yet compatible with procedural methodology, such as Python and Ruby. Besides Java, probably the most commercially important recent object-oriented languages are VB.NET and C Sharp designed for Microsoft's .NET platform.
Just as procedural programming led to refinements of techniques such as structured programming, modern object-oriented software design methods include refinements such as the use of design patterns, design by contract, and modelling languages (such as UML).
Basics of object-oriented programming
Implementation techniques
OOP with procedural languages
Definition
Class-based models
Inheritance
Critique
Prototype-based models
Object-based model
Multi-methods model
Formal definition
History
Some object oriented languages:
Further reading
See also
External links