Borland® Delphi™ 6 Developer's Guide

Object-Oriented Programming

Volumes have been written on the subject of object-oriented programming (OOP). Often, OOP seems more like a religion than a programming methodology, spawning arguments about its merits (or lack thereof) that are passionate and spirited enough to make the Crusades look like a slight disagreement. We're not orthodox OOPists, and we're not going to get involved in the relative merits of OOP; we just want to give you the lowdown on a fundamental principle on which Delphi's Object Pascal Language is based.

OOP is a programming paradigm that uses discrete objects—containing both data and code—as application building blocks. Although the OOP paradigm doesn't necessarily lend itself to easier-to-write code, the result of using ...