A few final remarks of OOP

OOP requires a new style of program design. Common behaviour and properties must be identified and described in several class hierarchies. Once the class hierarchies are defined, most of the work is done. New instances of these objects are created and their methods called.

The advantages of OOP are:

• Code re-used and uniqueness by inheritance and encapsulation

• Maintainability: changes in a superclass are seen by all subclasses

• Independence of code by encapsulation. Only the object's interface is seen by the outside world, not the implementation details.

• High degree of organisation and modularity of the code. This is especially important for large projects.

• Makes you think before coding.

The disadvantages:

• Compiled programs are usually larger because the inheritance mechanism must be implemented at runtime.

• Compiled programs are usually slower because inherited code must be looked up when called by sub-classes.