Home / Definitions / Abstraction

Abstraction

Webopedia Staff
Last Updated May 24, 2021 7:34 am

The process of picking out (abstracting) common features of objects and procedures. A programmer would use abstraction, for example, to note that two functions perform almost the same task and can be combined into a single function. Abstraction is one of the most important techniques in software engineering and is closely related to two other important techniques — encapsulation and information hiding. All three techniques are used to reduce complexity.