Delegation (object-oriented programming)

In object-oriented programming, delegation refers to evaluating a member (property or method) of one object (the receiver) in the context of another, original object (the sender). Delegation can be done explicitly, by passing the sending object to the receiving object, which can be done in any object-oriented language; or implicitly, by the member lookup rules of the language, which requires language support for the feature. Implicit delegation is the fundamental method for behavior reuse in prototype-based programming, corresponding to inheritance in class-based programming. The best-known languages that support delegation at the language level are Self, which incorporates the notion of delegation through its notion of mutable parent slots that are used upon method lookup on self calls, and JavaScript; see JavaScript delegation.

The term delegation is also used loosely for various other relationships between objects; see delegation (programming) for more. Frequently confused concepts are simply using another object, more precisely referred to as consultation or aggregation; and evaluating a member on one object by evaluating the corresponding member on another object, notably in the context of the receiving object, which is more precisely referred to as forwarding (when a wrapper object doesn't pass itself to the wrapped object). The delegation pattern is a software design pattern for implementing delegation, though this term is also used loosely for consultation or forwarding.

This sense of delegation as programming language feature making use of the method lookup rules for dispatching so-called self-calls was defined by Lieberman in his 1986 paper "Using Prototypical Objects to Implement Shared Behavior in Object-Oriented Systems".

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