The basics of delegation is that you have classes that could be written so that you must subclass them to do any interesting work. The delegate pattern is such

The basics of delegation is that you have classes that could be written so that you must subclass them to do any interesting work. The delegate pattern is such that you have some functions that affect the operation of the sub class(like filling a table full of data) so that it can be customized without subclassing. To delegate is to give responsibility to a subordinate. That's what you are doing; giving some control to a owning class. (not superclass)