What is Object Oriented Programming?
Several programming languages have been designed specifically to support Object Oriented Programming (OOP) and Object Oriented Design (OOD). One such language is C++. OOD/OOP is a paradigm. It was proceeded by a list of other programming paradigms: In the beginning there was “spaghetti code”. In this code, there was little or no structure to the code. Each programmer simply wrote code which would solve the given problem at hand. There was no such thing a function or procedure calls. As the name implies, it was extremely messy. In order to get a full understanding of this type code, try and follow one spaghetti noodle from end to end on a plate full of noodles without touching it. Kind of impossible isn’t it. Although a program of this type may work flawlessly for a given task, imagine how hard it would be to update this type of program. Now you know why the programmers working on Y2K are getting all the big bucks! After programmers attempted to update this type of program for a while (
Object oriented programming, or OOP, is one model of programming language. Unlike other examples of computer programming language, object oriented programming focuses on the use of objects instead of actions in order to carry out tasks. This use of objects to design applications instead of actions also involves taking an approach that is more mindful of data and less concerned with logic, which is more commonly the case in other paradigms. This different approach taken by object oriented programming means that the view of objects and actions is reversed. The emphasis is on the objects themselves rather than on the execution of tasks that employ the objects. In like manner, the structure of object oriented programming does not consider deciding on how to employ the logic, but on the definition of the data that will be used in the programming. Designing computer programs with the approach of object oriented programming begins with defining the objects that are to be manipulated by the pr
In classic, procedural programming you try to make the real world problem you’re attempting to solve fit a few, predetermined data types: integers, floats, Strings, and arrays perhaps. In object oriented programming you create a model for a real world system. Classes are programmer-defined types that model the parts of the system. A class is a programmer defined type that serves as a blueprint for instances of the class. You can still have ints, floats, Strings, and arrays; but you can also have cars, motorcycles, people, buildings, clouds, dogs, angles, students, courses, bank accounts, and any other type that’s important to your problem. Classes specify the data and behavior possessed both by themselves and by the objects built from them. A class has two parts: the fields and the methods. Fields describe what the class is. Methods describe what the class does. Using the blueprint provided by a class, you can create any number of objects, each of which is called an instance of the cla
