Inheritance
As mentioned earlier in this chapter, one of the most powerful attributes of OO programming is code reuse. Procedural programming provides code reuse to a certain degree—you can write a procedure and then use it as many times as you want. However, OO programming goes an important step further, allowing you to define relationships between classes that facilitate not only code reuse, but also better overall design, by organizing classes and factoring in commonalties of various classes. Inheritance is a primary means of providing this functionality.
Inheritance allows a class to inherit the attributes and methods of another class. This allows you to create brand new classes by abstracting out common attributes and behaviors.
One of the ...
Get Object-Oriented Thought Process, The, Second Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
