In object-oriented programming, you imagine that objects carry methods with them. Yet, the methods are not really stored with the objects. How does an object locate its methods? How does it know which methods to select? What is the name of the system support that is responsible for locating methods?

Each object has a tag indicating its class. To find a method, you use the class and the method name (or number) to look up the method in the dispatch table. The software that does this lookup is usually called the dispatcher.