Mikhail_Edoshin • today at 9:53 AM

Behavior is a good clue. The current model, even with data, lacks behavior. It has a method, which is like a message we send to it. But it does not seem to give it enough behavior, even though we don't make any assumptions about its complexity.

Or maybe it could give it behavior if it were like that:

    class Aaaa
      [some data]
      method handle(message, ...)
        [some code]

This construction implies there are multiple messages. "Multiple" is the key difference. The part that was missing in the original sketch is a second method:

    class Aaaa
      [some data]
      method bbbb()
        [some code]
      method cccc()
        [some code]

Now this is an object. For example, it can be a random number generator: we initialize it and then read next numbers. Or it could be a timer: we initialize it and then read the value. We do not need a fully object-oriented environment for that; there is a plenty of such things in C and other non-OOP systems.

Such a thing surely has some behavior and this is exactly what we use. We are not interested in the internal data much. In fact the internal data of an object play exactly the same role as a function stack frame: it is a private slice of memory a computation keeps for itself because this is how it works. As in knitting the size of the manipulator is tiny compared to the final result and to do anything substantial we need a place to keep stuff around until we are done. And we need to be sure data stay were we've put them, hence encapsulation.

So an object is very much like a function, it is a computation that uses some memory to do its job. It is different in that in an object the computation runs step-by-step guided by external events. A function is like an object that gets the whole sequence of events at once, runs from start to finish and in the end discards the working memory so we tend to forget it exists. An object runs from message to message and keeps the working memory, which we see as "object data". This is why objects arise naturally in areas like user interface where events are truly external. But an object is actually a primary form of computation: if you can process a single event, you can use it to process a sequence; but if you can only process the whole sequence, you cannot just switch to processing single events. There are many similarities with closures, coroutines and such; I'd say they are different ways to express the same principle.

(This also means that objects are naturally mutable. Immutable objects are an aberration that arose because we've got here in a very roundabout way.)