Indices Overview

"Object-oriented" has become such a fashional marketing buzzword as to have virtually lost meaning altogether: By now, one can probably purchase object-oriented toilet paper.

"Object-oriented" programming was originally intended as an antidote to the "top-down Structured Programming" paradigm in which attention was focused perhaps excessively upon the decomposition of the code into nested subroutines, with datastructures being treated as something of a neglected stepchild.

"Object-oriented" programming represented an attempt to reverse the mistake by instead focussing excessively on the datastructures and treating code as an afterthought, clearly a much healthier state of affairs grin...

In particular, some goals of the object-oriented programming paradigm were:

• Structure the program state as various kinds of chunks: objects belonging to classes.
• Implement important datastructures just once, and then re-use that implementation over and over.
• Make programs more modular by strictly segratating code according to the datastructure it works on and hiding the details of that datastructure's implementation from all other code in the system: implementation-hiding.
• Group similar datastructures into hierarchies, and share code used to implement common facilities, rather than replicating it: inheritance.
• Support abstract operations upon objects which automatically do "the appropriate thing" for a given object depending on its class: message-passing.

Muq is not a strongly "object-oriented" system in the classical sense outlined above, although the above sorts of things can indeed be done, as we shall see later.

In this section, however, we are interested in "object" in the very simplest sense, as a little package of information which may be modified and referred to as a whole.

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