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The class defines the data format or type (including member variables and their types) and available procedures (class methods or member functions) for a given type or class of object. Objects are created by calling a special type of method in the class known as a constructor. Classes may inherit from other classes, so they are arranged in a ...
For example, if a tree is cut down, the methods involved may need to join behavior in the bird and tax-assessor's subjects with that of the tree's own. It is therefore fundamentally a view of the compositional nature of software development, as opposed to the algorithmic (procedural) or representation-hiding (object) nature.
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., objects of the class) in the class hierarchy ...
The object methods include access to the object state (via an implicit or explicit parameter that references the object) whereas class methods do not. If the language supports inheritance , a class can be defined based on another class with all of its state and behavior plus additional state and behavior that further specializes the class.
This can require significantly less programming effort if the base class contains many methods providing default behavior and only a few of them need to be overridden within the derived class. For example, in the C# code below, the variables and methods of the Employee base class are inherited by the HourlyEmployee and SalariedEmployee derived ...
The following example uses the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) in which objects can change class without losing their identity. All variables or other storage locations which hold a reference to an object continue to hold a reference to that same object after it changes class.
A language that supports creating an object from a class is classified as class-based. A language that supports object creation via a template object is classified as prototype-based. The concept of object is used in many different software contexts, including: Possibly the most common use is in-memory objects in a computer program written in ...
The concept of the virtual function solves the following problem: In object-oriented programming, when a derived class inherits from a base class, an object of the derived class may be referred to via a pointer or reference of the base class type instead of the derived class type. If there are base class methods overridden by the derived class ...