Inheritance

Inheritance

The process where one object acquires the properties of another is simply inheritance. With the use of inheritance, the information is made manageable in a hierarchical order. When we talk about inheritance, the most commonly used keyword would be extends and implements. These words would determine whether one object IS-A type of another. By using these keywords we can make one object acquire the properties of another object.
Inheritance enables you to create a class that is similar to a previously defined class, but one that still has some of its own properties. Consider a car-simulation program. Suppose that you have a class for a regular car, but now you want to create a car that has a high-speed passing gear. In a traditional program, you might have to modify the existing code extensively and might introduce bugs into code that worked fine before your changes. To avoid these hassles, you use the object-oriented approach: Create a new class by inheritance. This new class inherits all the data and methods from the tested base class. (You can control the level of inheritance with the public, private, and protected keywords.