The Object Paradigm

This book is about the approach to software development which we call Object Technology. The first chapter discusses what objects are and why they are important. The treatment here is informal, giving the kind of intuitive account of the semantics of the features such as could be found in a reference manual or in an introductory textbook for a programming language. Some of the ideas are quite difficult to explain and understand at this informal level; particularly, it is difficult to comprehend in full the effects of constructs which involve polymorphism and deferred binding of method calls. It is also especially difficult to know what to expect if the features are misused.