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Virtual Classes Notes

ACADEMIC PROGRAMME: BSCS COMPUTER SCIENCE

COURSE CODE AND TITLE: BSCS 205: INTRODUCTION TO OOP
LECTURER’S NAME: PHILIP BTTOK
LECTURER’S CONTACTS: Phone No.: 0723683409 Email: [email protected]

Introduction to OOP
Expected Learning Outcomes:
By the end of this lesson, you should be able to:
i. Introduction to Object Oriented Concepts
ii. Benefits of OOP
Software Crisis
 Developments in the software industry continue to be mulled with a lot of challenges
 Software tools and technologies are developed daily
 It has forced software engineers to be keen with the approaches they adopt to stop
 The need for changes have created crises within the software industry and need to be addressed

 What need to be addressed include:

 How to represent real-life entities of problems in system design
 How to design systems with open interfaces?
 How to ensure reusability and extensibility of modules?
 How to develop modules that are tolerant of any changes in future?
 How to improve software productivity and decrease software cost?
 How to improve the quality of software
 How to manage time schedules

Evolution of Programming Languages

 Programming has evolved from the control of bits to high-level languages

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Procedure-Oriented Programming
 In procedure-oriented programming, the problem is viewed as the sequence of things to be
done such as reading, calculating and printing
 The primary focus is functions
 Examples of languages that use procedural programming include COBOL, FORTRAN, and C

Typical structure of procedural oriented programs

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 In procedural programming, we write instructions for computers to follow

 These instructions are grouped in functions
 Flowcharts are used for organizing actions and flow of the program
 In multi-function program, data items are placed as global so that they may be accessed by all
functions
 Each function may have its own local data
 Global data are vulnerable to an inadvertent change by a function
 In a large program, it is difficult to identify what data is used by which function
 Another serious drawback with the procedural approach is that we do not model real world
problems very well
 This is because functions are action-oriented
 The characteristics of procedure-oriented programming include:
 Emphasis is on doing things (algorithms)
 Large programs are divided into smaller programs called functions
 Most of the functions share global data
 Data move openly around the system from function to function
 Functions transform data from one form to another
 Employs top-down approach in program design

Object-Oriented Paradigm
 Eliminates the problems that were encountered in procedural programming
 Object Oriented Paradigm treats data as a critical element and thus does not allow it to flow
freely within the system
 It ties data to a function that uses it and protects it from accidental modification from outside
 OOP allows decomposition of a problem into a number of entities called objects and then
builds data and function around these objects

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 Characteristics of object oriented programming:

 Emphasis is on data rather than procedure
 Programs are divided into what are known as objects
 Data structures are designed such that they characterize the objects
 Functions that operate on the data of an object are tied together in the structure
 Data is hidden and cannot be accessed by external function
 Objects may communicate with each other through function
 New data and functions can be added whenever necessary
 It follows bottom-up approach in program design
Basic Concepts of Object Oriented Programing
 The basic concepts of object oriented programming include:
 Objects
 Classes
 Data abstraction
 encapsulation
 Inheritance
 Polymorphism
 Exception handling
Objects
 Objects are the basic run-time entities in OOP
 May represent a person, place, bank account, table of data
 It may represent user-defined data like vectors, time and lists
 Objects communicate with one another through message passing
 Example of an object

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Classes
 Classes are user-defined data type but also has functions in it
 A class, therefore is a blueprint for an object
 It declares and defines what data variables the object will have and what operations can be
performed on the class’s object
 For example mango, apple, and orange are members of fruit class
 If fruit has been defined as a class, then the statement Fruit Mango;
will create an object mango belonging to the class fruit

Data abstraction and encapsulation

 The wrapping up of data and function into a single unit (called a class) is known as
encapsulation.
 Data encapsulation enables only functions inside the class to access the data
 Data is not accessible to functions from outside
 The functions provides the interface between the object’s data and the program
 This insulation of the data from direct access by the program is called data hiding or
information hiding
 Abstraction refers to the act of representing essential features without including the background
details or explanation
 Classes use the concept of abstraction and are defined as a list of abstract attributes such as
size, weight and cost
 Functions operate on these attributes
 They encapsulate all these essential properties of the object that are created
 Attributes are sometimes called data members
 The functions that operate on these data are sometimes called methods or member functions

Inheritance
 Inheritance is the process by which objects of one class acquired the properties of objects of
another class
 Example class ‘robin’ is part of class ‘flying bird’ which is again part of the class ‘bird’
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 The logic behind this division is that each derived class shares common characteristics with the
class from which it is derived
 In OOP, the concept of inheritance provides the idea of reusability
 This means we can have additional features to a class without modifying it
 This is possible by deriving a new class from the existing one

Polymorphism
 Polymorphism is the ability to take more than one form
 An operation may exhibit different behaviors in different instances
 The behavior depends upon the types of data used in the operation
 Consider the operation addition. For two numbers the operation will be a sum. For two strings,
it will be concatenation
 The process of making an operator exhibit different behaviors in different instances is known as
operator overloading

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 Polymorphism plays an important role in allowing objects having different internal structures to
share the same internal interfaces
 This means that a general class of operations may be accessed n the same manner even though
specific action associated with each other may differ
 It is used extensively in inheritance

Exception Handling
 Exception handling is a feature in OOP
 Used to handle unresolved conflict

Benefits of OOP
 The advantages of OOP include:
 Eliminate redundant code by re-using classes
 It eliminates the need to re-invent the wheel by having to reuse modules already
developed
 Data hiding enables programmers enhance security of their data
 Possible to have many instances of an object without interference
 Partitioning of projects is easily achieved
 Easy upgrade from small to large system
 Easy to manage software complexity

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Further E-Resource Readings

CE, E. 3IT87: OBJECT ORIENTED PROGRAMMING WITH C++ CREDITS–4 (LTP: 3, 0, 2).

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