What makes a language Object-Oriented?

Question

Since debate without meaningful terms is meaningless, I figured I would point at the elephant in the room and ask: What exactly makes a language \"object-oriented\"? I\'m no

Answer 1

It's not really the languages that are OO, it's the code.

It is possible to write object-oriented C code (with structs and even function pointer members, if you wish) and I have seen some pretty good examples of it. (Quake 2/3 SDK comes to mind.) It is also definitely possible to write procedural (i.e. non-OO) code in C++.

Given that, I'd say it's the language's support for writing good OO code that makes it an "Object Oriented Language." I would never bother with using function pointer members in structs in C, for example, for what would be ordinary member functions; therefore I will say that C is not an OO language.

(Expanding on this, one could say that Python is not object oriented, either, with the mandatory "self" reference on every step and constructors called init, whatnot; but that's a Religious Discussion.)