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5.6 A Real-World Example of Specialization

Now that we have seen an abstract model of inheritance, discussed the general semantics of the relationship, and developed some useful heuristics, let us look at some real-world examples of specialization and generalization. Assume we are starting a new company. We might decide that we are all new employees and each new employee gets a salary, sick time, and a medical plan. A couple of methods applicable to new employees is taxes (to compute taxes from salary) and benefits (to handle the sick time and medical plan). Such a class could be diagrammed as shown in Figure 5.9.

Figure 5.9. The NewEmployee class.

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Six months go by and our start-up company is doing well because all of the employees work 80-hour weeks. We decide that anyone that has been employed by the company for six months should be considered a full employee with additional benefits over new employees. These benefits include a dental plan, vacation, and company car. Such a class is shown in Figure 5.10.

Figure 5.10. The FullEmployee class.

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We notice that the data members of the full employee are the same as the new employee except for the additional benefits. Likewise, as we discuss the taxes and benefits functions for the full employee, we find that the taxes function is identical to the new employee (we assume nontaxable benefits in this example) and the benefits function is the same except for some additional code to handle the dental plan, vacation, and company car. In short, we realize that the full employee is really just a special kind of new employee. Since inheritance is the relationship responsible for modeling specialization, we claim that there is an inheritance relationship between the full and new employee classes with full employee being a derived class of new employee (see Figure 5.11).

Figure 5.11. Using inheritance to create a better employee design.

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