Class
In object-oriented programming, a class is an extensible program-code-template for creating objects, providing initial values for state (member variables) and implementations of behavior (member functions or methods).
- Snippet from Wikipedia: Class (programming)
In programming, a class is a syntactic entity structure used to create objects. The capabilities of a class differ between programming languages, but generally the shared aspects consist of state (variables) and behavior (methods) that are each either associated with a particular object or with all objects of that class.
Object state can differ between each instance of the class whereas the class state is shared by all of them. The object methods include access to the object state (via an implicit or explicit parameter that references the object) whereas class methods do not.
If the language supports inheritance, a class can be defined based on another class with all of its state and behavior plus additional state and behavior that further specializes the class. The specialized class is a sub-class, and the class it is based on is its superclass.
In purely object-oriented programming languages, such as Java and C#, all classes might be part of an inheritance tree such that the root class is
Object, meaning all objects instances are ofObjector implicitly extendObject, which is called a top type.