What is Data abstraction? (JNNC Technologies)

Data abstraction allows a program to ignore the details of how a data type is represented. Abstraction (derived from a Latin word abs, meaning away from and trahere, meaning to draw) refers to the act of representing essential features without including the background details or explanations. C++ classes use the technique of abstraction and are defined as a list of abstract attributes such as width, cost, size etc and functions to operate on these attributes. They put in a nutshell all the essential properties of an object that are required to be created. The attributes are therefore called data members as they hold information. The functions that operate on those data members are termed as member functions. Since C++ classes use the data abstraction concept, they are also termed as abstract data types.

While classifying a class, both data members and member functions are expressed in the code. But, while using an object (that is an instance of a class) the built-in data types and the members in the class get ignored which is known as data abstraction.  It is a programming design technique that depends on the separation of an interface to that of implementation. So while designing your component, you being a programmer must keep interface independent of the implementation because if you change the underlying implementation then interface would remain intact. C++ provides a great level of data abstraction. In C++, we use classes to define our own abstract data types (ADT). Programmers can use the “cout” object of class ostream for data streaming to standard output like this:

Example:

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main()
{
    cout << "Hello World" << endl;
}