Inheritance
Explore the concept of inheritance in object oriented programming, understanding how child classes inherit properties from parent classes to promote code reuse and extend functionality. This lesson covers the is-a relationship and demonstrates how to structure classes effectively.
We'll cover the following...
Inheritance
As we can see, the power of object-oriented programming is that objects are self-contained entities that control their data. But object-oriented programming has another powerful feature that will let us reuse code, and that is the concept of inheritance.
The is-a relation
If someone asked you if they could borrow your phone to make a call, it would not matter if you gave them your smartphone, an old mobile phone from 2005, or even access to a landline telephone. They all share some of the same features, with one of them being the ability to make phone calls. We could define this with a chain of statements, as follows:
- A smartphone is a mobile phone.
- A mobile phone is a telephone.
- A telephone can make phone calls.
- A smartphone can, therefore, make phone calls.
We could say that we have several levels of abstraction where we have a relationship between the levels. This is what we ...