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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) ?

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    Association isn’t an OOP concept. It’s a UML concept. – candied_orange Jul 6 '20 at 14:46
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    I don't think the typical programmer sees inheritance, abstraction and polymorphism as forms of "association;" they see them as forms of abstraction. – Robert Harvey Jul 6 '20 at 14:59
  • Aggregation and composition are definitely more proper examples of "association." – Robert Harvey Jul 6 '20 at 15:05
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What’s missing in your basic OOP features are not associations, but composition:

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.

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