Abstraction and Classes

Life is full of complexities, and one way we cope with complexity is to frame simplifying abstractions. You are a collection of over an octillion atoms. Some students of the mind would say your mind is a collection of semiautonomous agents. But it's much simpler to think of yourself as a single entity. In computing, abstraction is the crucial step of representing information in terms of its interface with the user. That is, you abstract the essential operational features of a problem and express a solution in those terms. In the softball statistics example, the interface describes how the user initializes, updates, and displays the data. From abstraction, it is a short step to the user-defined type, which in C++ is a class ...

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