Object type (object-oriented programming)

In computer science, an object type (a.k.a. wrapping object) is a datatype which is used in object-oriented programming to wrap a non-object type to make it look like a dynamic object.

Some object-oriented programming languages make a distinction between reference and value types, often referred to as objects and non-objects on platforms where complex value types don't exist, for reasons such as runtime efficiency and syntax or semantic issues. For example, Java has primitive wrapper classes corresponding to each primitive type: Integer and int, Character and char, Float and float, etc. Languages like C++ have little or no notion of reference type; thus, the use of object type is of little interest.