In computer science, an object is anything that can be either input or output such an immediate number, literal string, variable or reference. In programming, especially in the object-oriented paradigm, it is more relevant to describe an object relating to a software abstraction of some real-world characteristic. For example, software to describe a multi-document editor may have a software object that abstracts a sheet of paper.
It can be considered to have characteristics forming a triple, in its most general terms, (O, A, V), where
- O can be a name (of the object),
- A can be a set of attributes (or properties),
- V can be a set of values for the attributes,
One of the attributes might be the type of the object.