The six definitions for Abstraction on Wordnet:
- a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance; "he loved her only in the abstract--not in person"
- the act of withdrawing or removing something
- the process of formulating general concepts by abstracting common properties of instances
- an abstract painting
- preoccupation with something to the exclusion of all else
- a general concept formed by extracting common features from specific examples
Abstraction in object oriented programmingIn object-oriented programming theory, abstraction is the facility to define objects that represent abstract "actors" that can perform work, report on and change their state, and "communicate" with other objects in the system. The term encapsulation refers to the hiding of state details, but extending the concept of data type from earlier programming languages to associate behavior most strongly with the data, and standardizing the way that different data types interact, is the beginning of abstraction. When abstraction proceeds into the operations defined, enabling objects of different types to be substituted, it is called polymorphism. When it proceeds in the opposite direction, inside the types or classes, structuring them to simplify a complex set of relationships, it is called delegation or inheritance.
= Anything imaginable, even nothing / null / zero. A better question is "what cannot" be imagined?
- How do I define abstract?
- Just something being vague, in-theory, guessed, or similar / analogous.
Glen
