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From: Chewbacca@cup.portal.com (Paul Frederick Snively)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: what is c++, c, ansi c etc...
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Date: 9 Apr 90 17:50:24 GMT
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brnstnd@stealth.acf.nyu.edu writes:

>> Also what is object oriented programming?
>
>The latest name that young urban computer science types have applied to the
>old idea of adding another level of indirection to function calls.

At best this definition is grossly naive and misinformed; at worst it is just
plain wrong.

There doesn't seem to be a "definitive" description of the fundamentals of
object-oriented programming, so the best that I can do is to provide you with
a list of the things that come to my mind when I happen to think of object-
oriented programming:

* Encapsulation (the association of data with the procedures that operate on
  them), whether rigidly enforced or not.
* Inheritance (the notion that these combinations of data and procedures can
  be described as increasing specializations of their ancestors, e.g. an AVL
  tree might be a specialization of a binary tree, which in turn might be a
  specialization of a tree, etc.  Many object-oriented systems use terms like
  class, superclass, and subclass to refer to this relationship).
* Polymorphism (the notion that I should be able to plug-and-play objects as
  long as I send them the right message with the right interface, e.g. asking
  a string object to "print" itself and asking a floating-point object to
  "print" itself should both work as I expect, regardless of how the "print"
  mechanism for each of those types does its thing).

Object-oriented languages run quite a gamut--everything from the deliberately
simplistic Object Pascal to the bordering-on-the-eldritch Common Lisp Object
System.

Hopefully this is a reasonable introduction to the underlying concepts.  Some
readers may point out that none of the features of object-oriented programming
is impossible to accomplish without using object-oriented programming
languages, and of course, they are correct--as usual, the issue is solely one
of whether you wish your language to assist you in such architectural trivia
or not.