Object Terminology

OOP is laden with terminology that seems daunting at first. The actual implementation of OOP is fairly easy to understand, but to prepare you for the terms ahead, take a moment to study the following OOP-related characteristics:

  • abstraction— The internals of an object do not always have to be known by the programmer to use an object.

  • class— The definition of a related group of objects.

  • inheritance— The capability to create a new class of objects from an existing class. Inheritance enables you to create new objects with behaviors and characteristics based on existing objects and classes.

  • message— A command that acts on specific objects, as opposed to language commands that are not tied to specific objects.

  • object— A collection

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