Personally I think of object-oriented programming as meaning procedural data abstraction - in OOP, a data abstraction (object) is the operations that can be per

Personally I think of object-oriented programming as meaning procedural data abstraction - in OOP, a data abstraction (object) is the operations that can be performed on it. This is in contrast to e.g. ML/Haskell algebraic types where a type is the set of values it can take. An object-oriented language is then a language designed to support this style of data abstraction, just as a (pure or impure) functional-oriented language is a language designed to support (where "support" is a superset of "enforce") a style of programming based on composition of pure functions. I am influenced by this paper -> http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/wcook/papers/OOPvsADT/CookOOPvsADT90.pdf http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/wcook/papers/OOPvsADT/CookOOP... (warning: PDF), which expresses more carefully and precisely what I in the above paragraph expressed sloppily.