Lecture 25

Object-oriented Programming 3

Inheritance

MCS 260 Fall 2020
Emily Dumas

Reminders

  • Work on Project 3 ASAP. Do not delay!
  • Worksheet 9 available
  • Quiz 9 soon
  • Goals

    • Continue working on Rectangle and Circle classes
    • Add additional operator overloading
    • Add a subclass
    • Result: Lecture 25 geom.py
      (If this module is updated in later lectures, this geom.py link will always go to the latest version.)
    • More overloading

      Recall operator overloading means writing code to give built-in operators custom behavior when applied to your classes.

      Last time: Custom equality test with __eq__.

      Now: Custom addition with __add__.

      We continue with geom.py from Lecture 24.

      How should we add two instances of Rectangle?

      Idea: Define R+S to be the smallest rectangle that contains both R and S.

      Inheritance

      Complex programs may have many classes.

      Often, some classes have a "is-a" relationship: One represents a more specific type of object than another.

      e.g. Dresser is a FurnitureItem

      More restrictive classes can have specialized functions (e.g. open_drawer(idx)) and attributes (e.g. ndrawers).

      In OOP, is-a relationships are formalized through inheritance. The more specific class is a subclass of the more general one.

      Subclasses inherit all methods and attributes from their superclass, but these can be changed or added to in the subclass definition.

      Syntax: class Dresser(FurnitureItem):

      Class hierarchy example

      Class hierarchy example

      In geom module?

      Circle and Rectangle share a lot of behavior—should both be subclasses of another class?

      This is worth considering, but we won't do it today.

      What if we want to add a class Square? Since any square is a rectangle, we should make Square a subclass of Rectangle.

      super()

      In a method of a subclass, super() returns an modified view of the current object that behaves like an instance of the superclass.

      e.g. In a Square object, super() returns a version of the same object that will act like a Rectangle.

      super() is often used to call the superclass constructor.

      __class__

      Every object has an attribute __class__ that refers to its class.

      In a method body, self.__class__.__name__ gives the name of the class as a string.

      References

      Revision history

      • 2020-10-21 geom.py link
      • 2020-10-20 Initial publication