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Fundamentals of Object Oriented Programming (OOP)
At the core of ColdC is the concept of Objects. Objects in ColdC
are much like objects in real-life: places, people, tables, man-eating
teddy bears...Objects can also be general descriptions of how
certain things behave (often referred to as Generic Objects or
Virtual Classes), such as a general description of a door (it
can be opened, closed, knocked on, and is opaque), or food (it can be
sniffed, tasted, eaten, or thrown; once eaten it is gone forever).
For those who already have some experience programming: The thing that
distinguishes Object-Oriented languages is that data is active. That
means that bundled with your structured variables are
methods for dealing with the stored data. If done right,
an object's data should only ever have to be accessed or changed by
using its methods. This way, if you as the object's manager decide to
re-implement how data is stored in the object, you can just change the
methods and not have to tell everyone using your object to make changes
to the way they access it.
Neale Pickett <zephyr@nmt.edu>