delegation (programming) in - dictionary and translation

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Delegation (programming)

In object-oriented programming, there are three related notions of delegation.

In its original usage, delegation refers to one object relying upon another to provide a specified set of functionalities. In research, this is often referred to as consultation or as aggregation in modeling.
In Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), a delegate is a form of type-safe function pointer usually used in an observer pattern as a means of telling which method to call when an event is triggered, keeping the method type.
Rarely, it refers to a programming language feature making use of the method lookup rules for dispatching so-called self-calls as defined by Lieberman in his 1986 paper "Using Prototypical Objects to Implement Shared Behavior in Object-Oriented Systems". Delegation as a language feature supports the prototype-based programming model.