this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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Programming
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Yeah thats kinda where the first object oriented programming came from. In C (which doesn’t have classes) you define a struct (an arrangement of data in memory, kinda like a named tuple in Python), and then you write functions to manipulate those structs.
For example, multiplying two complex vectors might look like:
Programmers decided it would be a lot more readable if you could write code that looked like:
Or even just;
(This last iteration is an example of “operator overloading”).
So yes, you can work entirely without classes, and that’s kinda how classes work under the hood. Fundamentally object oriented programming is just an organizational tool to help you write more readable and more concise code.
Thanks for elaborating! I'm pretty sure I've written some variations of the first form you mention in my learning projects, or broken them up in some other ways to ease myself into it, which is why I was asking as I did.