What is inheritance? Explain its advantages.

Ans: Inheritance

Inheritance is taken in the sense of code reuse within the object oriented development. During modeling, we look at the resulting classes, and try to group similar classes together so that code reuse can be enforced. Generalization, specialization, and inheritance have very close association. Generalization is used to refer to the relationship among classes, and inheritance is used for sharing attributes and operations using the generalization relationship. In respect of inheritance, generalization and specialization are two phases of a coin in the sense that if a subclass is seen from a superclass the subclass is seen as a specialized version of superclass and in, reverse, a superclass looks like general form of subclass.

During inheritance, a subclass may override a superclass feature by defining that feature with the same name. The overriding features (the subclass feature with the same names of superclass features) refines and replaces the overridden feature (the superclass feature). 

There are 5 types of inheritance-

1.      single level inheritance

2.      multilevel inheritance

3.      multiple inheritance

4.      hybrid inheritance

5.      hierarchical inheritance.

Advantages  of inheritance-

·         Reusability - facility to use public methods of base class without rewriting the same.

·         Extensibility - extending the base class logic as per business logic of the derived class.

·         Data hiding - base class can decide to keep some data private so that it cannot be altered by the derived class

·         Overriding -With inheritance, we will be able to override the methods of the base class so that meaningful implementation of the base class method can be designed in the derived class.