My explanation
Well there seems to be some confusing opinions on the net over what OOP seems to be. I've been reading up on the concepts of OOP after a little discussion with our teacher yesterday where he did most of the talking.
He followed the APIE principal
- A = Abstraction
- P = Polymorphism
- I = Inheritance
- E = Encapsulation
1. Abstraction
Not many sites talk about this concept as part of OOP but apparantly this means that abstract real world things to your code, for example Car, Vehicule, Sportscar, ... become objects. So you try to mimic Real world objects into an OO model.
2. Polymorphism
According to the teacher (who I hope will read this and orrect me), polymorphism is the fact that a certain object can be different at designtime then at runtime.
For example: A car is a vehicle and a sporstcar is a car. A vehicle has a max-speed of 80 and a car a max-speed of a 100 and sportscar a max-speed of 120. They all share the same method getspeed. At designtime you do this.
More or less pseudocode.
Vehicle vehicle = new Vehicle();
print vehicle.getspeed(); // This will give you 80
Vehicule vehicle = new Car();
print vehicle.getspeed(); // This will give you 100
Vehicle vehicle = new SportsCar();
print vehicle.getspeed(); // This will give you 120
So the vehicle is always of type Vehicule but depending on the implementation it will return a different speed.
3. Inheritance
A. The subclass inherits the methods of its superclass.
B. The subclass can add methods other then the once of the superclass.
C. The subclass can implement a method of the superclass differently via overriding.
4. Encapsulation
The hiding of your private attributes via public getters and setters.
Other explanations
I can live with the above, but I also like the opinion of others and they seem to differ somewhat.
This site seems to be in agreement somewhat.
This site seems to have a different concept of polymorphism. According to them polymorphism is nothing more then overloading and overriding
This professor of an Austin, TE college seems to forget about abstraction.
Here he talks about Encapsulation. Here about Polymorphism. Here about Inheritance. And this one tries to be too simple.
Starting here. So if anyone can come up with a better site please do.