Object Oriented Programming concepts

OOP has become one of the programming buzzwords today. There appears to be a great deal of excitement and interest among software engineers in using OOP. Applications of OOP are beginning to gain importance in many areas. The most popular application of object-oriented programming, up to now, has been in the area of user interface design such as window. Hundreds of windowing systems have been developed, using the OOP techniques. Real-business system are often much more complex and contain many more objects with complicated attributes and method. OOP is useful in these types of application because it can simplify a complex problem. The promising areas of application of OOP include:  Real-time system  Simulation and modeling Object-oriented data bases Hypertext, Hypermedia, and expertext AI and expert systems  Neural networks and parallel programming Decision support and office automation systems  CIM/CAM/CAD systems  The object-oriented paradigm spra...

OOP offers several benefits to both the program designer and the user. Object-Orientation contributes to the solution of many problems associated with the development and quality of software products. The new technology promises greater programmer productivity, better quality of software and lesser maintenance cost. The principal advantages are: Through inheritance, we can eliminate redundant code extend the use of existing classes We can build programs from the standard working modules that communicate with one another, rather than having to start writing the code from scratch. This leads to saving of development time and higher productivity. The principle of data hiding helps the programmer to build secure program that can not be invaded by code in other parts of a programs. It is possible to have multiple instances of an object to co-exist without any interference. It is possible to map object in the problem domain to those in the program. It is easy to partition the work ...

It is necessary to understand some of the concepts used extensively in object-oriented programming. These include: • Objects • Classes • Data abstraction and encapsulation • Inheritance • Polymorphism • Dynamic binding • Message passing We shall discuss these concepts in some detail in this section. 1) Objects Objects are the basic run time entities in an object-oriented system. They may represent a person, a place, a bank account, a table of data or any item that the program has to handle. They may also represent user-defined data such as vectors, time and lists. Programming problem is analyzed in term of objects and the nature of communication between them. Program objects should be chosen such that they match closely with the real-world objects. Objects take up space in the memory and have an associated address like a record in Pascal, or a structure in c. When a program is executed, the objects interact by sending messages to one another. For exam...