ABSTRACT
Object-oriented programming (OOP) has become a widely used and valuable tool for software engineering. Much of its value derives from the fact that it is often easier to design, write and maintain software when there is some clear separation of the data representation from the operations that are to be performed on it. In an OOP system, real physical things (like airline passengers or the data from a microarray experiment) are generally represented by classes, and methods (functions) are written to handle the different manipulations that need to be performed on the objects.
