Many older languages, like C and Pascal, were procedural languages. Procedures (also called functions) were blocks of code that were part of a module or application. Procedures passed parameters (primitive data types like integers, characters, strings, and floating point numbers). Code was treated separately to data. You had to pass around data structures, and procedures could easily modify their contents. This was a source of problems, as parts of a program could have unforeseen effects in other parts. Tracking down which procedure was at fault wasted a great deal of time and effort, particularly with large programs. You are reading the right article if it’s computer programming help that you seek.
In some procedural language, you could even obtain the memory location of a data structure. Armed with this location, you could read and write to the data at a later time, or accidentally overwrite the contents.
Java is an object-oriented language. An object-oriented language deals with objects. Objects contain both data (member variables) and code (methods). Each object belongs to a particular class, which is a blueprint describing the member variables and methods an object offers. In Java, almost every variable is an object of some type or another – even strings. Object-oriented programming requires a different way of thinking, but is a better way to design software than procedural programming. go to Download >>