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Everything about Delegation (object-oriented programming)

Evaluation and comparison of objects

In object-oriented programming, delegation refers to evaluating a member of one object in the context of another original object. Delegation can be done explicitly, by passing the responsibilities of the sending object to the receiving object, which can be done in any object-oriented language; or implicitly, by the member lookup rules of the language, which requires language support for the feature. Implicit delegation is the fundamental method for behavior reuse in prototype-based programming, corresponding to inheritance in class-based programming. The best-known languages that support delegation at the language level are Self, which incorporates the notion of delegation through its notion of mutable parent slots that are used upon method lookup on self calls, and JavaScript; see JavaScript delegation. Wikipedia →

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  4. Go sideways: Composition over inheritanceA closely related topic

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  1. Overview
  2. Language support for delegation

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