Basic Concepts of OOP

Basic Concepts of OOP

The Object Oriented Programing has been developed to overcome the drawbacks of procedural and modular programming. It is widely accepted that object-oriented programming is the most important and powerful way of creating software.

The Object-Oriented Programming approach mainly encourages:

• Modularisation: where the program can be decomposed into modules.

•Software re-use: where a program can be composed from existing and new modules.

Main Features of Object Oriented Programming

• Data Abstraction

• Encapsulation

• Modularity

• Inheritance

• Polymorphism

Encapsulation

The mechanism by which the data and functions are bound together into a single unit is known as Encapsulation. It implements abstraction.

Encapsulation is about binding the data variables and functions together in class. It can also be called data binding.

Encapsulation is the most striking feature of a class. The data is not accessible to the outside world, and only those functions which are wrapped in the class can access it. These functions provide the interface between the object’s data and the program.

This encapsulation of data from direct access by the program is called data hiding or information hiding.

Data Abstraction

Abstraction refers to showing only the essential features without revealing background details. Classes use the concept of abstraction to define a list of abstract attributes and function which operate on these attributes. They encapsulate all the essential properties of the object that are to be created. The attributes are called data members because they hold information. The functions that operate on these data are called methods or member function.

Modularity

Modularity is designing a system that is divided into a set of functional units (named modules) that can be composed into a larger application.

Inheritance

Inheritance is the technique of building new classes (derived class) from an existing Class (base class). The most important advantage of inheritance is code reusability.

Polymorphism

Polymorphism is the ability of a message or function to be displayed in more than one form.