In object-oriented programming, what does 'association' imply?

In object-oriented programming, association refers to a relationship between classes that indicates how objects of one class are connected to or interact with objects of another class. This concept is fundamental as it helps define how different entities within a system collaborate and communicate with one another, effectively modeling real-world relationships in the software design.

Association can be categorized into different types, such as one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many, depending on how many instances of each class are involved in the relationship. For instance, a "teacher" and "class" relationship can be one-to-many if one teacher can teach multiple classes, whereas a "student" and "class" relationship can also be one-to-many if a student may enroll in several classes.

The other options, while relevant in a broader context of object-oriented design, do not accurately capture the specific nature of association. For instance, life cycle dependency reflects the idea of a stronger relationship (like aggregation or composition), ownership and containment imply more direct control of one object over another, and a type of inheritance refers to a mechanism that allows one class to derive properties and behaviors from another class, which is a different concept altogether.