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In object-oriented programming, "immutable interface" is a pattern for designing an immutable object. [1] The immutable interface pattern involves defining a type which does not provide any methods which mutate state. Objects which are referenced by that type are not seen to have any mutable state, and appear immutable.
In object-oriented (OO) and functional programming, an immutable object (unchangeable [1] object) is an object whose state cannot be modified after it is created. [2] This is in contrast to a mutable object (changeable object), which can be modified after it is created. [3]
Many languages have explicit pointers or references. Reference types differ from these in that the entities they refer to are always accessed via references; for example, whereas in C++ it's possible to have either a std:: string and a std:: string *, where the former is a mutable string and the latter is an explicit pointer to a mutable string (unless it's a null pointer), in Java it is only ...
For function that manipulate strings, modern object-oriented languages, like C# and Java have immutable strings and return a copy (in newly allocated dynamic memory), while others, like C manipulate the original string unless the programmer copies data to a new string.
Some of these languages with immutable strings also provide another type that is mutable, such as Java and .NET's StringBuilder, the thread-safe Java StringBuffer, and the Cocoa NSMutableString. There are both advantages and disadvantages to immutability: although immutable strings may require inefficiently creating many copies, they are ...
In computer science, string interning is a method of storing only one copy of each distinct string value, which must be immutable. [1] Interning strings makes some string processing tasks more time-efficient or space-efficient at the cost of requiring more time when the string is created or interned.
Mutable (non-const) operations can then be implemented in such a way that they create new objects instead of modifying the existing ones. This approach is characteristic of functional programming and is also used by the string implementations in Java, C#, and Python. (See Immutable object.)
In computer science, having value semantics (also value-type semantics or copy-by-value semantics) means for an object that only its value counts, not its identity. [1] [2] Immutable objects have value semantics trivially, [3] and in the presence of mutation, an object with value semantics can only be uniquely-referenced at any point in a program.