Your job is to organize and manage these guys in whatever way you need them to work. Don't worry, they're good workers who will do what they're told. You just have to know how to communicate with them and understand how they operate. In this column, I will go through the main concepts of object-oriented programming so you can be a more skilled manager of your army of specialists. Classes serve as a blueprint for creating any number of objects that actually do the work at runtime.
Objects are runtime manifestations of a class that exist in a computer's memory.
Classes define in source code the data structures and any number of functions that can use or modify these data structures. The data structures are called instance variables , and the functions are called methods . In this way, objects are endowed with a state determined by the instance variables and a particular behavior defined by the methods. Message passing To understand the nature of objects, you must first understand how methods and data interact. Methods can be envisioned as wrapping around the data contained by an object, protecting it from the environment in which the object exists.