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In the classical object oriented model, an object encapsulates local state (instance variables) and contains a pointer to the shared procedures. These procedures are the methods, which operate on the encapsulated state, that forms the environment of the object. Each method can declare local variables as well as look up for additional state information from the shared environment based on lexical scoping rules. So we have the object as the combination of the environment and the set of methods that operate on the environment. Class based languages like Java and C++ provide another abstraction - the class, which instantiates objects by initializing the environment and setting up appropriate pointers to the shared procedures.