The following description of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) terminology is offered in the context of the C# programming language.
Class – A class represents an object in OOP parlance. A class can contain a number of types of members, most importantly, structures and methods.
Constructor – A method that is called automatically when an instance of a class is created. Commonly, used to initialize members of the class.
Derived From – The Apple class and Orange class are derived from the Fruit class.
Instance – One occurrence of a class. For example, each apple is an instance of the Apple class.
Method – A member of a class that takes arguments and returns a result. In traditional terminology, a function.
Reference – Although it isn’t a pointer, think of it as a pointer to an item (e.g., data, class).
Structure – A member of a class that structures one or more data items.
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