Immutable Object: Irresistible Force Paradox, Functional Programming, C, Object Lifetime, Clojure, Erlang (programming language), Object- oriented Programming, ... Memoization, Haskell (programming language).

In object-oriented and functional programming, an immutable object is an object whose state cannot be modified after it is created. This is in contrast to a mutable object, which can be modified after it is created. An object can be either entirely immutable or some attributes in the object may be declared immutable; for example, using the const member data attribute in the C++ programming language. In some cases, an object is considered immutable even if some internally used attributes change but the object's state appears to be unchanging from an external point of view. For example, an object that uses memoization to cache the results of expensive computations could still be considered an immutable object. The initial state of an immutable object is usually set at its inception, but can also be set before actual use of the object.