Beginning C# 2008 Objects: From Concept to Code

13.10. More About Inheritance and C#

From our discussion of inheritance in Chapter 5, we learned that

• Inheritance is used to derive a new class definition from an existing class when the new class is perceived to be a special case of the existing class.

• The derived class automatically inherits the data structure and behaviors of the base class.

• C# uses a colon followed by a class name in a class declaration to signal that one class is derived from another:

  public class Person
  {
    private string name;
  
    public string Name {
      get {
        return name;
      }
      set {
        name = value;
      }
    }
  }
  
  // We derive the Student class from Person.
  							public class Student : Person { // If we define nothing in the body of this class, it will still // have one field, name, and one property, ...