Object orientation is in many ways a natural style of programming whose techniques are reinvented constantly by every programer (Coplien 1992). Object notation consolidates these techniques, so that much of the tedious programming necessary to use them is automatically handled by the interpreter. An object can be thought of as an abstract data type that is very useful in separating the idea of what a thing does from the details of the way it goes about doing it. Support for objects in hoc came late to NEURON, after the notion of cable sections, and as a consequence there are several types of variables (e.g. sections, mechanisms, range variables) that are clearly treated as objects from a conceptual point of view but grew up without a uniform syntax.

In hoc, an object is a collection of functions, procedures, and data, where the data defines the state of the object. There is just enough extra syntax in hoc to support a subset of the object-oriented programming paradigm: specifically, it supports information hiding and polymorphism, but not inheritance. Yet this subset is sufficient to greatly increase the user's ability to maintain conceptual control of complex programs.