[OOP - Lec 02] Why do we need OOP

Why Do We Need Object-
Oriented Programming?
Muhammad Hammad Waseem
m.hammad.wasim@gmail.com

Why Do We Need Object-Oriented
Programming?
• Object-Oriented Programming was developed because limitations
were discovered in earlier approaches to programming.
• To appreciate what OOP does, we need to understand what these
limitations are and how they arose from traditional programming
languages.

Procedural Languages
• C, Pascal, FORTRAN, and similar languages are procedural languages.
• That is, each statement in the language tells the computer to do something:
• Get some input, add these numbers, divide by 6, display that output.
• A program in a procedural language is a list of instructions.
• For very small programs, no other organizing principle (often called a
paradigm) is needed.
• The programmer creates the list of instructions, and the computer carries
them out.

Division into Functions
• When programs become larger, a single list of instructions becomes
unwieldy.
• Few programmers can comprehend a program of more than a few
hundred statements unless it is broken down into smaller units.
• For this reason the function was adopted as a way to make programs
more comprehensible to their human creators.
• A procedural program is divided into functions, and (ideally, at least)
each function has a clearly defined purpose and a clearly defined
interface to the other functions in the program.

Division into Functions
• The idea of breaking a program into functions can be further
extended by grouping a number of functions together into a larger
entity called a module (which is often a file).
• Dividing a program into functions and modules is one of the
cornerstones of structured programming, the somewhat loosely
defined discipline that influenced programming organization for
several decades before the advent of Object-Oriented Programming.

Problems with Structured Programming
• As programs grow ever larger and more complex, even the structured
programming approach begins to show signs of strain.
• Analyzing the reasons for failures reveals that there are weaknesses in
the procedural paradigm itself.
• No matter how well the structured programming approach is implemented,
large programs become excessively complex.
• What are the reasons for these problems with procedural languages?
• There are two related problems.
• First, functions have unrestricted access to global data.
• Second, unrelated functions and data, the basis of the procedural paradigm,
provide a poor model of the real world.

Unrestricted Access
• In a procedural program, one written in C for example, there are two kinds
of data.
• Local data is hidden inside a function, and is used exclusively by the function.
• However, when two or more functions must access the same data—and this is true
of the most important data in a program—then the data must be made global
• In a large program, there are many functions and many global data items.
• The problem with the procedural paradigm is that this leads to an even
larger number of potential connections between functions and data
• This large number of connections causes problems in several ways.
• First, it makes a program’s structure difficult to conceptualize.
• Second, it makes the program difficult to modify.
• A change made in a global data item may result in rewriting all the functions that access that
item.

Real-World Modeling
• The more important problem with the procedural paradigm is that its arrangement of separate
data and functions does a poor job of modeling things in the real world.
• In the physical world we deal with objects such as people and cars. Such objects aren’t like data
and they aren’t like functions.
• Complex real-world objects have both attributes and behavior.
• Attributes: (sometimes called characteristics) are, for people, eye color and job titles; and, for
cars, horsepower and number of doors.
• As it turns out, attributes in the real world are equivalent to data in a program:
• they have a certain specific values, such as blue (for eye color) or four (for the number of doors).
• Behavior: Behavior is something a real-world object does in response to some stimulus. Behavior
is like a function: you call a function to do something.
• If you ask your boss for a raise, she will generally say yes or no.
• If you apply the brakes in a car, it will generally stop.
• Saying something and stopping.
• So neither data nor functions, by themselves, model real world objects effectively.

The Object-Oriented Approach
• The fundamental idea behind object-oriented languages is to combine into a single unit
both data and the functions that operate on that data. Such a unit is called an object.
• An object’s functions, called member functions in C++, typically provide the only way to
access its data.
• If you want to read a data item in an object, you call a member function in the object.
• It will access the data and return the value to you.
• You can’t access the data directly. The data is hidden, so it is safe from accidental alteration.
• Data and its functions are said to be encapsulated into a single entity.
• Data encapsulation and data hiding are key terms in the description of object-oriented
languages.
• If you want to modify the data in an object, you know exactly what functions interact
with it: the member functions in the object. No other functions can access the data. This
simplifies writing, debugging, and maintaining the program.

The Object-Oriented Approach
• A C++ program typically consists of a number of objects,
• which communicate with each other by calling one another’s member
functions.
• The member functions in C++ are called methods.
• Also, data items are referred to as attributes or instance variables.
• Calling an object’s member function is referred to as sending a
message to the object.
• These terms are not official C++ terminology, but they are used with
increasing frequency, especially in object-oriented design.

[OOP - Lec 02] Why do we need OOP

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[OOP - Lec 02] Why do we need OOP