Abstract Base Classes
Get introduced to abstract base classes in this lesson.
We'll cover the following
It is mandatory for a derived class to implement methods of a base class. In this lesson, we’ll see how the Python built-in abc
module facilitates it.
Introduction
A class that contains one or more than one abstract method is called an abstract class. An abstract method is declared, but isn’t implemented. The abc
module in the Python library provides the infrastructure for defining custom abstract base classes as sometimes it’s not possible to instantiate a base class.
This module works by marking methods of the base class as abstract. This is done by the @abstractmethod
decorator. A subclass of an abstract base class then overrides its abstract methods. The abc
module defines ABCMeta
class, which is a metaclass for defining abstract base classes.
Explanation
Consider, there are two classes:
Base
- An abstract base classDerived
- A concrete subclass
Let’s do some coding using the abc module.
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