As we said earlier in our discussion of
object-oriented programing, methods are the verbs of objects.
Methods, like subroutines in procedural-oriented programming,
are the basic unit of funtionality of an object. They are a
body of executable code contained within a class which can be
used to effect an instantiated object of the class.
Methods consist of the following
components:
A method name
A list of inputs which may be empty
A return type which may be "void" if
the method returns nothing
The code to perform some action
Actually, some methods, such as abstract
methods, do not require executable code. Abstract methods are
used like interfaces to help define a skeleton of functionality
but leave the fleshing out to another.
Consider the following code
snippet:
int add(int a, int b)
{
return (a+b);
}
In this case, we have created a method
which adds two integers passed to it as arguments and then
returns the result. The method is named add and might be used
in your code with a line such as the following in which
mySum is set to "7":
int mySum = add(3, 4)
Note that you can only define methods
within the body of a class definition so the above code alone
would not work unless you made it part of a class.
