Inheritance and Polymorphism Chapter 9 Fall 2006 CS 101 Aaron Bloomfield

This section is not required material!!!! A note about inheritance… It’s not normally covered in 101 It will be gone over in more detail in CS 201 Ask questions if you are confused about inheritance You aren’t the only one!

Motivation Consider a transportation computer game Different types of vehicles: Planes Jets, helicopters, space shuttle Automobiles Cars, trucks, motorcycles Trains Diesel, electric, monorail Ships … Let’s assume a class is written for each type of vehicle

More on classes vs. objects

Motivation Sample code for the types of planes: fly() takeOff() land() setAltitude() setPitch() Note that a lot of this code is common to all types of planes They have a lot in common! It would be a waste to have to write separate fly() methods for each plane type What if you then have to change one – you would then have to change dozens of methods

Motivation Indeed, all vehicles will have similar methods: move() getLocation() setSpeed() isBroken() Again, a lot of this code is common to all types of vehicles It would be a waste to have to write separate move() methods for each vehicle type What if you then have to change one – you would then have to change dozens of methods What we want is a means to specify one move() method, and have each vehicle type inherit that code Then, if we have to change it, we only have to change one copy

Motivation Provides: Provides: move() fly() getLocation() takeOff() setSpeed() isBroken() Provides: fly() takeOff() land() setAltitude() setPitch() Provides: oilChange() isInTraffic() Provides: derail() getStation()

Motivation What we will do is create a “parent” class and a “child” class The “child” class (or subclass) will inherit the methods (etc.) from the “parent” class (or superclass) Note that some classes (such as Train) are both subclasses and superclasses

Inheritance code class Vehicle { ... } class Train extends Vehicles { class Monorail extends Train {

About extends If class A extends class B Then class A is the subclass of B Class B is the superclass of class A A “is a” B A has (almost) all the methods and variables that B has If class Train extends class Vehicle Then class Train is the subclass of Vehicle Class Vehicle is the superclass of class Train Train “is a” Vehicle Train has (almost) all the methods and variables that Vehicle has

Object-oriented terminology In object-oriented programming languages, a class created by extending another class is called a subclass The class used for the basis is called the superclass Alternative terminology The superclass is also referred to as the base class The subclass is also referred to as the derived class Monorail Train Vehicle

Another example Consider shapes in a graphics program Shape class Circle class Cube class Dodecahedron class

Inheritance Organizes objects in a top-down fashion from most general to least general Inheritance defines a “is-a” relationship A mountain bike “is a” kind of bicycle A SUV “is a” kind of automobile A border collie “is a” kind of dog A laptop “is a” kind of computer

Inheritance and Battleship We could have defined a Player class And have the Human and AI classes be subclasses We want the Human and AI interfaces to be the same! This is one way to do this

Packages Allow definitions to be collected together into a single entity—a package The classes in our game could be added to a package Classes and names in the same package are stored in the same folder Classes in a package go into their own “namespace” and therefore the names in a particular package do not conflict with other names in other packages For example, a package called OtherGame might have a different definition of Map

Controlling access ü Class access rights Member Restriction this Subclass Package General public ü protected ¾ default private

Java’s Mother-of-all-objects—Class Object Class Object provides basic versions of several methods. In particular, it has methods toString(), equals(), and clone(). It also has methods finalize(), getClass(), hashCode(), notify(), notifyAll(), and wait(). These are all inherited by the subclasses of Object.

Thus, everything extends Object Either directly or indirectly So what does that give us? Object contains the following methods: clone() equals() toString() and others… Thus, every class has those methods

A note about equals() Why does the equals() method always have to have the following prototype: boolean equals(Object obj) Many other class in the Java SDK require the use of equals() Such as the Vector class Those classes need to know how the equals() method will work in order for them to work properly Thus, it must have the same prototype

Overriding Consider the following code: class Foo { // automatically extends Object public String toString () { return “Foo”; } ... Foo f = new Foo(); System.out.println (f); Now there are two toString() method defined One inherited from class Object One defined in class Foo And they both have the same prototype! Which one does Java call?

Overriding Java will call the most specific overriden method it can toString() in Foo is more specific than toString() in Object Consider our transportation hierarchy: Assume each class has its own toString() method Car extends Automobile extends Vehicle (extends Object) Assume each defines a toString() methods The toString() method in Vehicle is more specific (to vehicles) than the one in Object The toString() method in Automobiles is more specific than the ones in Vehicle or Object The toString() method in Car is more specific than the ones in Automobile, Vehicle, or Object Thus, for a Car object, the Car toString() will be called There are ways to call the other toString() methods This has to be specifically requested

Overriding This is called overriding, because the toString() in Foo “overrides” the toString() in Object Note that the prototype must be EXACTLY the same With overloading, the parameter list must be DIFFERENT Overriding only works with inheritance In particular, you can only override a method already defined in a parent (or grandparent, etc.) class