Abstract Data Types

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An abstract data type (ADT) is a specification of a set of data and the set of operations that can be performed on the data. Such a data type is abstract in the sense that it is independent of various concrete implementations. The definition can be mathematical, or it can be programmed as an interface. A first class ADT supports the creation of multiple instances of the ADT, and the interface normally provides a constructor, which returns an abstract handle to new data, and several operations, which are functions accepting the abstract handle as an argument.[1]

The main contribution of the abstract data type theory (and its evolution, the design by contract) is that it (1) formalizes a definition of type (which was only intuitively hinted on procedural programming) (2) on the basis of the information hiding principle and (3) in a way that such formalization can be explicitly represented in programming language notations and semantics. This important advance in computer science theory (motivated by software engineering challenges in procedural programming) led to the emergence of languages and methodological principles of object-oriented programming.