Object-oriented programming

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which may contain data, in the form of fields, often known as attributes; and code, in the form of procedures, often known as methods. A feature of objects is that an object's procedures can access and often modify the data fields of the object with which they are associated (objects have a notion of "this" or "self").

Class-based vs prototype-based[edit]

In class-based languages the classes are defined beforehand and the objects are instantiated based on the classes. If two objects apple and orange are instantiated from the class Fruit, they are inherently fruits and it is guaranteed that you may handle them in the same way; e.g. a programmer can expect the existence of the same attributes such as color or sugar content or is ripe.

In prototype-based languages the objects are the primary entities. No classes even exist. The prototype of an object is just another object to which the object is linked. Every object has one prototype link (and only one). New objects can be created based on already existing objects chosen as their prototype. You may call two different objects apple and orange a fruit, if the object fruit exists, and both apple and orange have fruit as their prototype. The idea of the fruit class doesn't exist explicitely, but as the equivalence class of the objects sharing the same prototype. The attributes and methods of the prototype are delegated to all the objects of the equivalence class defined by this prototype. The attributes and methods owned individually by the object may not be shared by other objects of the same equivalence class; e.g. the attributes sugar content may be unexpectedly not present in apple. Only single inheritance can be implemented through the prototype.

Dynamic dispatch/message passing[edit]

It is the responsibility of the object, not any external code, to select the procedural code to execute in response to a method call, typically by looking up the method at run time in a table associated with the object. This feature is known as dynamic dispatch, and distinguishes an object from an abstract data type (or module), which has a fixed (static) implementation of the operations for all instances. If there are multiple methods that might be run for a given name, it is known as multiple dispatch.

A method call is also known as message passing. It is conceptualized as a message (the name of the method and its input parameters) being passed to the object for dispatch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming