Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Abstraction is a fundamental concept in computer science and software engineering, especially within the object-oriented programming paradigm. [3] Examples of this include: the usage of abstract data types to separate usage from working representations of data within programs; [4]
An abstract stack is a last-in-first-out structure, It is generally defined by three key operations: push, that inserts a data item onto the stack; pop, that removes a data item from it; and peek or top, that accesses a data item on top of the stack without removal.
The foundation of class-based object-oriented programming. Interface: A group of related methods with empty bodies, used to define methods that can be applied to different data types. Widely used in object-oriented programming for abstraction and multiple inheritance. Module
An abstraction can be seen as a compression process, [7] mapping multiple different pieces of constituent data to a single piece of abstract data; [8] based on similarities in the constituent data, for example, many different physical cats map to the abstraction "CAT".
All object-oriented programming (OOP) systems support encapsulation, [2] [3] but encapsulation is not unique to OOP. Implementations of abstract data types, modules, and libraries also offer encapsulation. The similarity has been explained by programming language theorists in terms of existential types. [4]
In object-oriented programming, objects have methods that can change or use the object's data. Many programming languages use a special word, like this or self , to refer to the current object. In languages that support open recursion , a method in an object can call other methods in the same object, including itself, using this special word.
The abstraction principle is mentioned in several books. Some of these, together with the formulation if it is succinct, are listed below. Alfred John Cole, Ronald Morrison (1982) An introduction to programming with S-algol: "[Abstraction] when applied to language design is to define all the semantically meaningful syntactic categories in the language and allow an abstraction over them".
[3]: 273 However, in strongly-typed object-oriented programming languages it may be somewhat complicated for a developer to write reusable homogeneous containers. Because of differences in element types this results in a tedious process of writing and keeping a collection of containers for every elemental type.