Boxing (computer programming)

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

Some object-oriented programming language make an distinction betweeen objects an non-objects, often referred to as primitive types for reasons such as runtime efficiency and syntax or semantic issues. For example, Java has object types corresponding to each primitive types. Such are Integer and Character. In languages like C++ that make little or no distinction between objects and non-objects, the use of object type is of little interest.

The automatical conversion between object types and non-object types are called automatic boxing.