Is the C programming language object-oriented?

c oop standards
Brian T Hannan picture Brian T Hannan · Jul 14, 2010 · Viewed 85.1k times · Source

I was talking with a co-worker about C and C++ and he claimed that C is object-oriented, but I claimed that it was not. I know that you can do object-oriented-like things in C, but C++ is a true object-oriented language.

What are your thoughts?

Also, it triggered discussion on who decides what it means to be object-oriented and that it's tough to say what object-oriented really officially means. What are you thoughts on this?

Answer

James McNellis picture James McNellis · Jul 14, 2010

If by "is C object oriented?" you mean "is C designed with facilities specifically to support object oriented programming?" then, no, C is clearly not object oriented.

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