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What is a method? In OO programming, we don't think of operating on data directly from outside an object; rather, objects have some understanding of how to operate on themselves (when asked nicely to do so). You might say we pass messages to an object, and those messages will generally elicit some kind of an action or meaningful reply. This ought to happen without our necessarily knowing or caring how the object really works inside. The tasks we are allowed to ask an object to perform (or equivalently, the messages it understands) are that object's methods.