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[citation needed] In C++ private inheritance can be used as a form of implementation inheritance without substitutability. Whereas public inheritance represents an "is-a" relationship and delegation represents a "has-a" relationship, private (and protected) inheritance can be thought of as an "is implemented in terms of" relationship. [16]
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).
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 generalization relationship—also known as the inheritance or "is a" relationship—captures the idea of one class, the so-called subclass, being a specialized form of the other (the superclass, super type, or base class). Where this relationship holds, the superclass is considered a generalization of the subclass.
Composition over inheritance (or composite reuse principle) in object-oriented programming (OOP) is the principle that classes should favor polymorphic behavior and code reuse by their composition (by containing instances of other classes that implement the desired functionality) over inheritance from a base or parent class. [2]
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 like the Object Management Group. The class hierarchy can be as deep as needed.
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.
It is a central tenet of object-oriented analysis and design that subtype polymorphism, which is implemented in most object-oriented languages via inheritance, should be used to model object types that are subsets of each other; this is commonly referred to as the is-a relationship. In the present example, the set of circles is a subset of the ...