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5.1 Introduction to the Inheritance Relationship

The inheritance relationship is one of the more important relationships within the object-oriented paradigm. It is best used to capture the a-kind-of relationship between classes, such as ChevyChevelle is a-kind-of Car, Dog is a-kind-of Animal. Its primary purpose is twofold: It acts as a mechanism for expressing commonality between two classes (generalization), and it is used to specify that one class is a special type of another class (specialization). The terms "specialization" and "generalization" are generally considered synonyms of "inheritance." They are used often during object-oriented design critiques to discuss the process under which inheritance was found, that is, did the designer have the more general class first (specialization) or the more specific class first (generalization)? If an inheritance hierarchy is simply shown to a developer, there is no way that he or she can determine whether specialization or generalization was used to find the inheritance relationships. Many object-oriented designers have found that generalization is the more difficult, and less frequently discovered, form of inheritance.

Generalization usually tends to be more common in version 1 of a system. During the design process, the system architects decide that two or more classes have something in common, namely, data, behavior, or just a common interface. This common information is collected in a more general class from which the two or more classes can inherit. Undiscovered generalization relationships will result in duplicate abstractions and implementations, that is, data, code, and/or public interfaces. Many generalizations are found toward the end of the object-oriented design process. These generalizations can be added late in the process with little or no effect on the other members of the design team.

In contrast, specialization tends to be more common in successive versions of a particular system. As the system adapts to added functionality, some classes will inevitably require special treatment. Inheritance is ideal for implementing these special cases. It is especially useful for adapting standard components for use in application-specific areas. For this reason, inheritance is called the reusability mechanism of the object-oriented paradigm.

It is very important to note that a major stumbling block while learning the object-oriented paradigm is that developers confuse the containment and inheritance relationships in their designs. The information in this chapter is meant to prevent this problem. We will begin with an abstract example of inheritance in order to discuss the vocabulary and semantics of the mechanism. We will then examine many real-world examples of specialization, generalization, and the many misuses of inheritance. Consider the example in Figure 5.1, where class B inherits from class A.

Figure 5.1. Class B inherits from class A.

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First a little vocabulary. If a class inherits from another class, it is called a subclass. If a class is inherited by another class, it is called a superclass. The inventor of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup, realized that these terms are ambiguous (for reasons we will see in the following discussion). He decided to rename superclass as base class and subclass as derived class. In this example, class A is considered a superclass or base class of class B, and class B is considered a subclass or derived class of class A.

If a class inherits from another class, then the inheriting class should be a special type of the inherited class. In this abstract example, class B is a special type of class A, meaning all B objects are first and foremost A objects. This implies that inheritance is a class-based relationship since all objects of the class must obey the relationship.

The first semantics of the inheritance relationship that one notices is that all derived classes (their objects) get a copy of the base class's data (see Figure 5.2). This does not necessarily imply that methods of the derived class can see the data of their base class; that is a matter for some debate. It implies that a subclass will always have a superset of its superclass's data (a proper superset if the subclass has any data of its own). Many newcomers to the paradigm argue that the terms "superclass" and "subclass" are backwards with regard to the set of data of each class. In fact, the terms "superclass" and "subclass" do not refer to the set of data in each class; they refer to the set of objects under each class. Since all B objects are legal A objects by definition, class A will always have a superset of B's objects (a proper superset if there are any A objects at all). It is this situation that Stroustrup found ambiguous and which led him to create the terms "base class" and "derived class."

Figure 5.2. Class B inherits from class A: inheritance of data.

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We discussed in Chapter 2 the fact that classes have two access areas, public and private. Within the framework of inheritance, it makes sense to consider a third level of access: protected. All three access areas can contain data as well as function members. The private area of a class is available only to the implementors of the class, that is, those who write methods for the class. The public area of a class is available to all implementors and users of the class. We have argued that no data should be placed in the public section since that would create an undesirable relationship between the users of the class and its implementation. The protected section of the class is something between public and private. It looks like private access to all users of the class except the implementors of derived classes. In our example in Figure 5.3, anything in the protected section of A would be visible to implementors of A (obviously) and implementors of B since B is a derived class of A. It would be invisible to other users of A as well as to the users of B. The main question is, "Should an implementor of B be allowed to see A's data?" Before we answer the question, we need to know a bit more about the semantics of inheritance.

Figure 5.3. Class access rules.

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If inheritance only implied getting a copy of the base class data in the derived class, then the relationship would be useless. The containment relationship has the exact same semantics. There would be no difference between "class B inherits from class A" and "class B contains class A." There must be some other difference that sets inheritance apart from containment. Since classes capture data and behavior, and we have already covered inheritance of data, it must be the behavior that is of interest. When a class inherits from another class, it not only gets a copy of the base class data, it also gets access to the base class functionality. This is what sets the containment and inheritance relationships apart. When a class contains another class, the containing class does not get the functionality of its contained class as part of its public interface. For example, the meal class contains a melon and the melon class has a peel operation that returns a rind. Does this imply that meals have a peel function defined in their public interface? The answer is no! Implementors of meals can send the contained melon the peel message as part of the implementation of a method for the meal class, but meals themselves do not get the operation for free. If the meal class inherited from the melon class, then the meal class would receive the peel function as part of its public interface. This would be necessary since we would be arguing that meals are special kinds of melons. If a class is a special type of another class, then it must behave like the other class.

In our abstract example, objects of class B would be allowed to process the messages f1, f2, and f3 since B objects are special types of A objects. Normally, if a B object were sent the message f1, the system would ask, "Do B objects know how to f1?" If the answer is no, error! Within the presence of inheritance, the system asks the same question, but if the answer is no it then asks, "Does B inherit from someone who does know how to f1?" If the answer is no, it is again an error. If, however, the answer is yes, then the system uses the inherited method to execute the message f1. If inheritance is being used to model a specialization hierarchy梐nd it should be梩hen the derived class is not allowed to eliminate any of the functionality of the base class. Otherwise anything could be made a special type of anything else by simply eliminating all behavior of the base class and adding all new behavior to the derived class; for example, a monkey is a special type of banana except it doesn't peel, turn_yellow, or chop; it does jump, squeal, and swing_from_trees though.

The inheritance of functionality and data creates an extremely powerful extensibility mechanism. It allows a designer to create a special type of an existing class which has additional data and function members and to guarantee that the new type is behaviorally compatible with the old type. This implies that I can change each base class object into a new derived class object and guarantee that the system will run exactly as it did before. This fact is easy to prove. Any message being sent to objects of the base class will be inherited from the base class by the new derived objects. These messages access data of the base class only; therefore, we have the same code running on the same data, providing behavioral compatibility (see Figure 5.4).

Figure 5.4. Class B inherits from class A: inheritance of behavior.

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