# Classes and OOP in Ada
Ada provides a common feature set for OOP. It allows you to define classes, interfaces, supports 
polymorphism, abstract types, interfaces and methods, which are called primitives in Ada, but serve the 
same purpose. The idiomatic ways are different from other, popular OOP languages like C++ or Java, but 
that's just natural. After all, Ada's syntax differs in many ways.

## Classes
Ada does not formally know classes. It knows *tagged records* and a record is the basic Ada compound 
type. A *tagged record* is just a record with additional meta data (a *„Tag“*) that allows the compiler 
to perform some magic like {ref}`gloss_dispatching`.

#### The controlling parameter
The {ref}`controlling parameter <gloss_controlling_parameter>` is a formal parameter in a {ref}`primitive 
<gloss_primitive>`.

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```{tags} ada
```