Are inheritance, abstraction and polymorphism regarded as association in OOP?

Question

In the realm of OOP, inheritance, abstraction and polymorphism are basic concepts of the paradigm.

On top of that, there also have the concept called "associations" which I understand is that one object associates (uses) another object. There are also specialized forms of "associations" - aggregation and composition.

What I'm really confused about is that some sites on the Internet (even some university slides) mixing all these terms and sometimes refer "Inheritance", "Polymorphism", "Abstraction" as the associations.

So the relationships between objects forming because of "Inheritance", "Abstraction" and "Polymorphism" are included in the concept of "association" (or at least in terms) ?

Answer 1

What’s missing in your basic OOP features are not associations, but composition:

• object composition is a way to make more complex object structures
• object composition can often be a better alternative for inheritance (i.e. prefer composition over inheritance)
• object composition can be used to implement associations

Every OOP languages provides composition. None provides association. Associations are an abstraction of the way composition is used to connect objects.

Remark: the fact of using an object is not sufficient to make an association (see discussion here). It just creates a dependency.