Abstraction
Data abstraction is one of the most essential and important features of object-oriented programming in C++. Abstraction means displaying only essential information and hiding the details. Data abstraction refers to providing only essential information about the data to the outside world, hiding the background details or implementation. Consider a real-life example of a man driving a car. The man only knows that pressing the accelerator will increase the speed of the car or applying brakes will stop the car but he does not know how on pressing the accelerator the speed is actually increasing, he does not know about the inner mechanism of the car or the implementation of an accelerator, brakes, etc. in the car. This is what abstraction is.
- Abstraction using Classes: We can implement Abstraction in C++ using classes. The class helps us to group data members and member functions using available access specifiers. A Class can decide which data member will be visible to the outside world and which is not.
- Abstraction in Header files: One more type of abstraction in C++ can be header files. For example, consider the pow() method present in math.h header file. Whenever we need to calculate the power of a number, we simply call the function pow() present in the math.h header file and pass the numbers as arguments without knowing the underlying algorithm according to which the function is actually calculating the power of numbers.
To know more about C++ abstraction, refer to this article – Abstraction in C++
Object Oriented Programming in C++
Object-oriented programming – As the name suggests uses objects in programming. Object-oriented programming aims to implement real-world entities like inheritance, hiding, polymorphism, etc. in programming. The main aim of OOP is to bind together the data and the functions that operate on them so that no other part of the code can access this data except that function.
There are some basic concepts that act as the building blocks of OOPs i.e.
- Class
- Objects
- Encapsulation
- Abstraction
- Polymorphism
- Inheritance
- Dynamic Binding
- Message Passing