Ubuntu Unleashed 2013 Edition: Covering 12.10 and 13.04, Eighth Edition

Class Inheritance

Python allows you to reuse your code by inheriting one class from one or more others. For example, lions, tigers, and bears are all mammals and so share a number of similar properties. In that scenario, you do not want to have to copy and paste functions between them; it is smarter (and easier) to have a mammal class that defines all the shared functionality and then inherit each animal from that.

Consider the following code:

class Car(object):    color = "black"    speed = 0    def accelerate_to(self, speed):        self.speed = speed    def set_color(self, color):        self.color = colormycar = Car()print mycar.color

That creates a Car class with a default color and provides a set_color() function so that people can change ...