(I realize that I could be waiting a long time for cold tap water in Arizona). By turning the faucet to the on position, I send a message to the faucet to start the water coming. When I am done, I send another message to the faucet to stop the water. I'm nuts you say? Not really. It is just another way of looking at what is required to accomplish a given task. And that is what object-oriented programming is all about - another way to look at programming.
Writing a Macintosh program is an enormous task. Perhaps some of you are black belt hackers, but for most of us our first introduction to "Mac-like" programming was something of a shock. Talk about complex! I have heard it said that there are over 1000 routines built into the Macintosh ROMs to assist a programmer in creating the various elements of the
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user interface that you and I love (and others love to imitate). Just programming a window to do everything that it should do is quite a project. There are so many details to take care of. Objects don't eliminate that complexity, but they do make it more manageable.
One of the ways that objects make programming more manageable is to package the procedures that operate on data together with the data. You can think of an object as being "smart" data. An object "knows" how to do certain things by virtue of being the kind of object that it is. You send an object a message and the object will perform the requested operation on the