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For example, the following C++ code establishes an explicit inheritance relationship between classes B and A, where B is both a subclass and a subtype of A and can be used as an A wherever a B is specified (via a reference, a pointer or the object itself).
The concept of class hierarchy in computer science is very similar to taxonomy, the classifications of species. The relationships are specified in the science of object-oriented design and object interface standards defined by popular use, language designers ( Java , C++ , Smalltalk , Visual Prolog ) and standards committees for software design ...
The C++ examples in this section demonstrate the principle of using composition and interfaces to achieve code reuse and polymorphism. Due to the C++ language not having a dedicated keyword to declare interfaces, the following C++ example uses inheritance from a pure abstract base class .
Multiple inheritance is a feature of some object-oriented computer programming languages in which an object or class can inherit features from more than one parent object or parent class. It is distinct from single inheritance, where an object or class may only inherit from one particular object or class.
Meanwhile, the same operation name among objects in an inheritance hierarchy may behave differently. For example, objects of the type Circle and Square are derived from a common class called Shape. The Draw function for each type of Shape implements what is necessary to draw itself while calling code can remain indifferent to the particular ...
Not all languages support multiple inheritance. For example, Java allows a class to implement multiple interfaces, but only inherit from one class. [22] If multiple inheritance is allowed, the hierarchy is a directed acyclic graph (or DAG for short), otherwise it is a tree. The hierarchy has classes as nodes and inheritance relationships as links.
A good example of the has-a relationship is containers in the C++ STL. To summarize the relations, we have hypernym-hyponym (supertype-subtype) relations between types (classes) defining a taxonomic hierarchy, where for an inheritance relation: a hyponym (subtype, subclass) has a type-of (is-a) relationship with its hypernym (supertype ...
The g++ compiler implements the multiple inheritance of the classes B1 and B2 in class D using two virtual method tables, one for each base class. (There are other ways to implement multiple inheritance, but this is the most common.) This leads to the necessity for "pointer fixups", also called thunks, when casting. Consider the following C++ code: