Inheritance is one of the basic fundamental concepts of OOP’s. Inheritance represents the IS-A relationship between the objects which is also known as a parent-child relationship. Some more points are listed below,
- The process by which one class acquires the properties (data members) and functionalities (methods) of another class is called inheritance.
- The code that is already present in base class need not be rewritten in the child class.
- The inheritance mechanism is very useful in code reuse.
- A class which is inherited is called a Base Class / Parent class / Super class. The classes which are inheriting Base classes are called Child class / Sub class.
- In Java, A subclass can have only one Parent class, whereas a Parent class may have one or more Child classes. Because Java doesn’t support multiple inheritance.
- The meaning of “extends” is to increase the functionality.
Important points on Inheritance
What is inheritance?
Inheritance which allows a class to inherit behavior and data from other class. In other word inheritance is a mechanism wherein a new class is derived from an existing class.
Types of Inheritance
- Single inheritance
- Multiple inheritance
- Hierarchical inheritance
- Multilevel inheritance
- Hybrid inheritance
What is the primary benefit of inheritance?
- Code reusability and reduces duplicate code.
- It makes code more flexible.
- It takes less time for application development and execution.
- Memory consumption is less and performance will be improved.
- Since less number of code, storage cost will be reduced.
Example1
class Parentclass
{
//Data and methods
}
class Childclass extends Parentclass
{
//Data and methods
}
Example2
//Base class
class Vehicle{
public int gear;
public int speed;
public Vehicle(int gear, int speed){
this.gear = gear;
this.speed= speed;
}
public String display(){
return ("Gear is: "+ gear +" and the speed is: "+speed);
}
}
//Derived Class
class PulsarBike extends Vehicle {
public int NoOfWheels;
public PulsarBike(int gear, int speed, int wheel) {
super(gear, speed);
NoOfWheels = wheel;
}
//Overridding
public String display(){
return ("Gear is "+ gear +", speed is "+speed+ " and noOfWheel is: "+NoOfWheels);
}
}
public class Inheritance {
public static void main(String[] args) {
PulsarBike pule = new PulsarBike(5, 60, 2);
System.out.println(pule.display());
}
}
Output:
Gear is 5, speed is 60 and noOfWheel is: 2Recommended post in OOPs concept:
