Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In object-oriented programming, a class defines the shared aspects of objects created from the class. The capabilities of a class differ between programming languages , but generally the shared aspects consist of state ( variables ) and behavior ( methods ) that are each either associated with a particular object or with all objects of that class.
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 .
A class in C++ is a user-defined type or data structure declared with any of the keywords class, struct or union (the first two are collectively referred to as non-union classes) that has data and functions (also called member variables and member functions) as its members whose access is governed by the three access specifiers private, protected or public.
Together this implies that a class in Smalltalk is an object and that, therefore a class needs to be an instance of a class (called metaclass). As an example, a car object c is an instance of the class Car. In turn, the class Car is again an object and as such an instance of the metaclass of Car called Car class. Note the blank in the name of ...
A class containing a pure virtual function is called an abstract class. Objects cannot be created from an abstract class; they can only be derived from. Any derived class inherits the virtual function as pure and must provide a non-pure definition of it (and all other pure virtual functions) before objects of the derived class can be created.
The process of verifying and enforcing the constraints of types—type checking—may occur at compile time (a static check) or at run-time (a dynamic check). If a language specification requires its typing rules strongly, more or less allowing only those automatic type conversions that do not lose information, one can refer to the process as strongly typed; if not, as weakly typed.
C and C++ perform such promotion for objects of Boolean, character, wide character, enumeration, and short integer types which are promoted to int, and for objects of type float, which are promoted to double. Unlike some other type conversions, promotions never lose precision or modify the value stored in the object. In Java:
traversal, that is the way of traversing the objects of the container. Container classes are expected to implement CRUD-like methods to do the following: create an empty container (constructor); insert objects into the container; delete objects from the container; delete all the objects in the container (clear); access the objects in the container;