7

INHERITANCE: EXTENDING CLASSES

7.1 INTRODUCTION TO CODE REUSE

Almost all programming languages support functions that allow a piece of code to be reused again and again in a calling program. However, functions provide rather limited support for code reuse. In object-oriented programming (OOP), code reuse is a central feature. In fact, we can reuse the code written in a class in another class by either of the two mechanisms given below:

  1. Containership
  2. Inheritance
7.2 CONTAINERSHIP

In day-to-day life, we come across objects which are composed of other objects. For instance, a computer is composed of objects like motherboard, hard disk, CD-ROM drive, monitor, etc. The motherboard contains a CPU and other components. The CPU contains ALU, CU and ...

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