Fundamentals of Object-Oriented Programming
1.1 INTRODUCTION
One characteristic that is constant in the softwere industry today is "change". Change is one of the most critical aspects of softwere development and management. New tools and new approaches are announced almost everyday. The impact of these developments is often very extensive and raises a number of issues that must be addressed by the software engineers. Most important among them are maintainability, reusability, portability, security, integrity, and user friendliness of software products.
To build today's complex software it is just not enough to put together a seqence of programming statements and sets of procedures and modules. We need to use sound constrution techniques and program structures that are easy to comprehend, implement and modify in a wide vaiety of situations.
Since the invention of the computer, many programming approaches have been tried. These include techniques such as modular programming, too-doun programming, bottom-up programming and structuresd programming. The primary motivation in each case has been the concern to handle the increasing complexity of programs that are reliable and maintainable. These tecniques became popular among programmers over the last two decades.
With the advent of languages such as C, structured programming became very popular and was the paradigm of the 1980s. structured programming proved to be a powerful tool that enabled programmers to write moderately complex programs fairly easily. However, as the programs grewlarge, even the structured approach failed to show the desired result in terms of bug-free, easy-to-manitain, and reusable programs.
Object-oriented programming (OOP) is an approach to program organization and development. which attemps to eliminate some of the pitfalls of conventional programming methods by incorporating the best of structured programming features with several new concepts. It is a new wayto do with any particular language. However, not all languages are suitable to implement the oop concepts easily. Languages that support OOP features include Smalltalk, Objective C, C++, Ada and Object. C++, an extension of C language, is the most popular OOP language today. C++ is basically a procedural language with object oriented extension. Java, a pure object oriented language, is one of the recent languages added to this list the latest one being C#
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