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Method chaining is a common syntax for invoking multiple method calls in object-oriented programming languages. Each method returns an object, allowing the calls to be chained together in a single statement without requiring variables to store the intermediate results.
Cascading can be implemented in terms of chaining by having the methods return the target object (receiver, this, self).However, this requires that the method be implemented this way already – or the original object be wrapped in another object that does this – and that the method not return some other, potentially useful value (or nothing if that would be more appropriate, as in setters).
A property, in some object-oriented programming languages, is a special sort of class member, intermediate in functionality between a field (or data member) and a method.The syntax for reading and writing of properties is like for fields, but property reads and writes are (usually) translated to 'getter' and 'setter' method calls.
In some languages, a pointer can reference executable code, i.e., it can point to a function, method, or procedure. A function pointer will store the address of a function to be invoked. While this facility can be used to call functions dynamically, it is often a favorite technique of virus and other malicious software writers.
Indeed, the call stack mechanism can be viewed as the earliest and simplest method for automatic memory management. However, another advantage of the call stack method is that it allows recursive function calls , since each nested call to the same procedure gets a separate instance of its private data.
Hence it is the original receiver entity that is the start of method lookup even though it has passed on control to some other object (through a delegation link, not an object reference). Delegation has the advantage that it can take place at run time and affect only a subset of entities of some type and can even be removed at run time.
Conversely, if a datatype is defined in a given package, and a multi-method extension using that type is also defined in the same package, and a value of that type is passed (through a base type reference or into a generic function) into another package with no dependency on that package, and then the multi-method is invoked with that value as ...
In object oriented programming, objects provide a layer which can be used to separate internal from external code and implement abstraction and encapsulation. External code can only use an object by calling a specific instance method with a certain set of input parameters, reading an instance variable, or writing to an instance variable.