OO Concepts

Software concepts essential to object orientation:

• Encapsulation - the grouping of related ideas into unit. Encapsulating attributes and behaviors.
• Inheritance - a class can inherit its behavior from a superclass (parent class) that it extends.
• Polymorphism - literally means ``many forms''.
• Information/implementation hiding - the use of encapsulation to keep implementation details from being externally visible.
• State retention - the set of values an object holds.
• Oject identity - an object can be identified and treated as a distinct entity.
• Message passing - the ability to send messages from one object to another.
• Classes - the templates/blueprints from which objects are created.
• Genericity - the construction of a class so that one or more of the classes it uses internally is supplied only at run time.