Methods

Methods often seem to be the forgotten part of object-oriented languages. The emphasis seems very much to be on inheritance and polymorphism, not on what methods are and how they are derived. This chapter reviews the position of methods in object-oriented languages and how they are located. Methods are the representation of operations in an object-oriented programming language. The slots of an object represent the properties or data that the object encapsulates and methods represent the operations that are defined over these slots. They are procedures and functions which are associated with an object via its class or prototype and are intended to perform the operations defined for that object or class of objects. Methods are the procedural component of object-oriented languages of all kinds.