9.4. Relationship between Superclasses and Subclasses

In this section, we use an inheritance hierarchy containing types of employees in a company’s payroll application to discuss the relationship between a superclass and its subclass. In this company, commission employees (who will be represented as objects of a superclass) are paid a percentage of their sales, while base-salaried commission employees (who will be represented as objects of a subclass) receive a base salary plus a percentage of their sales.

We divide our discussion of the relationship between commission employees and base-salaried commission employees into five examples. The first example declares class CommissionEmployee, which directly inherits from class Object and declares ...

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