Inheritance (object-oriented programming)

In object-oriented programming, inheritance is the mechanism of basing an object or class upon another
object (prototype-based inheritance) or class (class-based inheritance), retaining similar implementation. Also
defined as deriving new classes (sub classes) from existing ones such as super class or base class and then
forming them into a hierarchy of classes. In most class-based object-oriented languages, an object created
through inheritance, a "child object", acquires all the properties and behaviors of the "parent object" , with the
exception of: constructors, destructor, overloaded operators and friend functions of the base class. Inheritance
allows programmers to create classes that are built upon existing classes,[1] to specify a new implementation
while maintaining the same behaviors (realizing an interface), to reuse code and to independently extend
original software via public classes and interfaces. The relationships of objects or classes through inheritance
give rise to a directed graph.

Inheritance was invented in 1969 for Simula[2] and is now used throughout many object-oriented
programming languages such as Java, C++ or Python.

An inherited class is called a subclass of its parent class or super class. The term "inheritance" is loosely used
for both class-based and prototype-based programming, but in narrow use the term is reserved for class-based
programming (one class inherits from another), with the corresponding technique in prototype-based
programming being instead called delegation (one object delegates to another).

Inheritance should not be confused with subtyping.[3][4] In some languages inheritance and subtyping agree,[a]
whereas in others they differ; in general, subtyping establishes an is-a relationship, whereas inheritance only
reuses implementation and establishes a syntactic relationship, not necessarily a semantic relationship
(inheritance does not ensure behavioral subtyping). To distinguish these concepts, subtyping is also known as
interface inheritance, whereas inheritance as defined here is known as implementation inheritance or code
inheritance.[5] Still, inheritance is a commonly used mechanism for establishing subtype relationships.[6]

Inheritance is contrasted with object composition, where one object contains another object (or objects of one
class contain objects of another class); see composition over inheritance. Composition implements a has-a
relationship, in contrast to the is-a relationship of subtyping.

Contents
Types
Subclasses and superclasses
Non-subclassable classes
Non-overridable methods
Virtual methods
Visibility of inherited members
Applications
Overriding
Code reuse
Inheritance vs subtyping
Design constraints
Issues and alternatives
See also
Notes
References
Further reading

Types
There are various types of inheritance, based on paradigm and specific
language.[7]

Single inheritance

where subclasses inherit the features of one superclass. A class acquires the
properties of another class.

Multiple inheritance

where one class can have more than one superclass and inherit features from Single inheritance
all parent classes.

"Multiple inheritance ... was widely supposed to be very difficult

to implement efficiently. For example, in a summary of C++ in
his book on Objective C, Brad Cox actually claimed that adding
multiple inheritance to C++ was impossible. Thus, multiple
inheritance seemed more of a challenge. Since I had considered
multiple inheritance as early as 1982 and found a simple and
efficient implementation technique in 1984, I couldn't resist the
challenge. I suspect this to be the only case in which fashion
affected the sequence of events."[8] Multiple inheritance

— Bjarne Stroustrup

Multilevel inheritance

where a subclass is inherited from another subclass. It is not uncommon that a class is derived from another
derived class as shown in the figure "Multilevel inheritance".

The class A serves as a base class for the derived class B, which in turn serves as a base class for the derived
class C. The class B is known as intermediate base class because it provides a link for the inheritance between
A and C. The chain ABC is known as inheritance path.

A derived class with multilevel inheritance is declared as follows:

Class A(...); // Base class

Class B : public A(...); // B derived from A
Class C : public B(...); // C derived from B

This process can be extended to any number of levels.

Hierarchical inheritance

This is where one class serves as a superclass (base class) for more than one
sub class. For example, a parent class, A, can have two subclasses B and C.
Both B and C's parent class is A, but B and C are two separate subclasses.

Hybrid inheritance

Hybrid inheritance is when a mix of two or more of the above types of

inheritance occurs. An example of this is when class A has a subclass B
which has two subclasses, C and D. This is a mixture of both multilevel
inheritance and hierarchal inheritance.
Multilevel inheritance

Subclasses and superclasses

Subclasses, derived classes, heir classes, or child classes are modular derivative classes that inherits one or
more language entities from one or more other classes (called superclass, base classes, or parent classes). The
semantics of class inheritance vary from language to language, but commonly the subclass automatically
inherits the instance variables and member functions of its superclasses.

The general form of defining a derived class is:[9]

class SubClass: visibility SuperClass

{
// subclass members
};

The colon indicates that the subclass inherits from the superclass. The visibility is optional and,
if present, may be either private or public. The default visibility is private. Visibility specifies
whether the features of the base class are privately derived or publicly derived.

Some languages support also the inheritance of other constructs. For example, in Eiffel, contracts that define
the specification of a class are also inherited by heirs. The superclass establishes a common interface and
foundational functionality, which specialized subclasses can inherit, modify, and supplement. The software
inherited by a subclass is considered reused in the subclass. A reference to an instance of a class may actually
be referring to one of its subclasses. The actual class of the object being referenced is impossible to predict at
compile-time. A uniform interface is used to invoke the member functions of objects of a number of different
classes. Subclasses may replace superclass functions with entirely new functions that must share the same
method signature.

Non-subclassable classes

In some languages a class may be declared as non-subclassable by adding certain class modifiers to the class
declaration. Examples include the final keyword in Java and C++11 onwards or the sealed keyword in
C#. Such modifiers are added to the class declaration before the class keyword and the class identifier
declaration. Such non-subclassable classes restrict reusability, particularly when developers only have access
to precompiled binaries and not source code.

A non-subclassable class has no subclasses, so it can be easily deduced at compile time that references or
pointers to objects of that class are actually referencing instances of that class and not instances of subclasses
(they don't exist) or instances of superclasses (upcasting a reference type violates the type system). Because the
exact type of the object being referenced is known before execution, early binding (also called static dispatch)
can be used instead of late binding (also called dynamic dispatch), which requires one or more virtual method
table lookups depending on whether multiple inheritance or only single inheritance are supported in the
programming language that is being used.

Non-overridable methods

Just as classes may be non-subclassable, method declarations may contain method modifiers that prevent the
method from being overridden (i.e. replaced with a new function with the same name and type signature in a
subclass). A private method is unoverridable simply because it is not accessible by classes other than the class
it is a member function of (this is not true for C++, though). A final method in Java, a sealed method in
C# or a frozen feature in Eiffel cannot be overridden.

Virtual methods

If the superclass method is a virtual method, then invocations of the superclass method will be dynamically
dispatched. Some languages require that methods be specifically declared as virtual (e.g. C++), and in others,
all methods are virtual (e.g. Java). An invocation of a non-virtual method will always be statically dispatched
(i.e. the address of the function call is determined at compile-time). Static dispatch is faster than dynamic
dispatch and allows optimisations such as inline expansion.

Visibility of inherited members

The following table shows which variables and functions get inherited dependent on the visibility given when
deriving the class.[10]

Base class visibility Derived class visibility

Public derivation Private derivation Protected derivation

Private → Not inherited Not inherited Not inherited

Protected → Protected Private Protected
Public → Public Private Protected

Applications
Inheritance is used to co-relate two or more classes to each other.

Overriding

Many object-oriented programming languages permit a class or object to replace the implementation of an
aspect—typically a behavior—that it has inherited. This process is called overriding. Overriding introduces a
complication: which version of the behavior does an instance of the inherited class use—the one that is part of
its own class, or the one from the parent (base) class? The answer varies between programming languages, and
some languages provide the ability to indicate that a particular behavior is not to be overridden and should
behave as defined by the base class. For instance, in C#, the base method or property can only be overridden
in a subclass if it is marked with the virtual, abstract, or override modifier, while in programming languages
such as Java, different methods can be called to override other methods.[11] An alternative to overriding is
hiding the inherited code.
Code reuse

Implementation inheritance is the mechanism whereby a subclass re-

uses code in a base class. By default the subclass retains all of the
operations of the base class, but the subclass may override some or all
operations, replacing the base-class implementation with its own.

In the following Python example, subclasses

SquareSumComputer and CubeSumComputer override the
transform() method of the base class SumComputer. The
base class comprises operations to compute the sum of the squares
between two integers. The subclass re-uses all of the functionality of
the base class with the exception of the operation that transforms a
number into its square, replacing it with an operation that transforms a
number into its square and cube respectively. The subclasses therefore
compute the sum of the squares/cubes between two integers.

Below is an example of Python. Illustration of method overriding

class SumComputer(object):
def __init__(self, a, b):
self.a = a
self.b = b

def transform(self, x):

raise NotImplementedError

def inputs(self):
return range(self.a, self.b)

def compute(self):
return sum(self.transform(value) for value in
self.inputs())

class SquareSumComputer(SumComputer):
def transform(self, x):
return x * x

class CubeSumComputer(SumComputer):
def transform(self, x):
return x * x * x

In most quarters, class inheritance for the sole purpose of code reuse has fallen out of favor. The primary
concern is that implementation inheritance does not provide any assurance of polymorphic substitutability—an
instance of the reusing class cannot necessarily be substituted for an instance of the inherited class. An
alternative technique, explicit delegation, requires more programming effort, but avoids the substitutability
issue. 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.[12]

Another frequent use of inheritance is to guarantee that classes maintain a certain common interface; that is,
they implement the same methods. The parent class can be a combination of implemented operations and
operations that are to be implemented in the child classes. Often, there is no interface change between the
supertype and subtype- the child implements the behavior described instead of its parent class.[13]

Inheritance vs subtyping
Inheritance is similar to but distinct from subtyping.[14] Subtyping enables a given type to be substituted for
another type or abstraction, and is said to establish an is-a relationship between the subtype and some existing
abstraction, either implicitly or explicitly, depending on language support. The relationship can be expressed
explicitly via inheritance in languages that support inheritance as a subtyping mechanism. For example, 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).

class A {
public:
void DoSomethingALike() const {}
};

class B : public A {
public:
void DoSomethingBLike() const {}
};

void UseAnA(const A& a) {

a.DoSomethingALike();
}

void SomeFunc() {
B b;
UseAnA(b); // b can be substituted for an A.
}

In programming languages that do not support inheritance as a subtyping mechanism, the relationship between
a base class and a derived class is only a relationship between implementations (a mechanism for code reuse),
as compared to a relationship between types. Inheritance, even in programming languages that support
inheritance as a subtyping mechanism, does not necessarily entail behavioral subtyping. It is entirely possible
to derive a class whose object will behave incorrectly when used in a context where the parent class is
expected; see the Liskov substitution principle. [15] (Compare connotation/denotation.) In some OOP
languages, the notions of code reuse and subtyping coincide because the only way to declare a subtype is to
define a new class that inherits the implementation of another.

Design constraints

Using inheritance extensively in designing a program imposes certain constraints.

For example, consider a class Person that contains a person's name, date of birth, address and phone
number. We can define a subclass of Person called Student that contains the person's grade point average
and classes taken, and another subclass of Person called Employee that contains the person's job-title,
employer, and salary.

In defining this inheritance hierarchy we have already defined certain restrictions, not all of which are
desirable:

Singleness
Using single inheritance, a subclass can inherit from only one superclass. Continuing the
example given above, Person can be either a Student or an Employee, but not both.
Using multiple inheritance partially solves this problem, as one can then define a
StudentEmployee class that inherits from both Student and Employee. However, in
most implementations, it can still inherit from each superclass only once, and thus, does not
support cases in which a student has two jobs or attends two institutions. The inheritance
model available in Eiffel makes this possible through support for repeated inheritance.

Static
 The inheritance hierarchy of an object is fixed at instantiation when the object's type is
selected and does not change with time. For example, the inheritance graph does not allow a
Student object to become a Employee object while retaining the state of its Person
superclass. (This kind of behavior, however, can be achieved with the decorator pattern.)
Some have criticized inheritance, contending that it locks developers into their original
design standards.[16]

Visibility
Whenever client code has access to an object, it generally has access to all the object's
superclass data. Even if the superclass has not been declared public, the client can still cast
the object to its superclass type. For example, there is no way to give a function a pointer to a
Student's grade point average and transcript without also giving that function access to all
of the personal data stored in the student's Person superclass. Many modern languages,
including C++ and Java, provide a "protected" access modifier that allows subclasses to
access the data, without allowing any code outside the chain of inheritance to access it.

The composite reuse principle is an alternative to inheritance. This technique supports polymorphism and code
reuse by separating behaviors from the primary class hierarchy and including specific behavior classes as
required in any business domain class. This approach avoids the static nature of a class hierarchy by allowing
behavior modifications at run time and allows one class to implement behaviors buffet-style, instead of being
restricted to the behaviors of its ancestor classes.

Issues and alternatives

Implementation inheritance is controversial among programmers and theoreticians of object-oriented
programming since at least the 1990s. Among them are the authors of Design Patterns, who advocate interface
inheritance instead, and favor composition over inheritance. For example, the decorator pattern (as mentioned
above) has been proposed to overcome the static nature of inheritance between classes. As a more fundamental
solution to the same problem, role-oriented programming introduces a distinct relationship, played-by,
combining properties of inheritance and composition into a new concept.

According to Allen Holub, the main problem with implementation inheritance is that it introduces unnecessary
coupling in the form of the "fragile base class problem":[5] modifications to the base class implementation can
cause inadvertent behavioral changes in subclasses. Using interfaces avoids this problem because no
implementation is shared, only the API.[16] Another way of stating this is that "inheritance breaks
encapsulation".[17] The problem surfaces clearly in open object-oriented systems such as frameworks, where
client code is expected to inherit from system-supplied classes and then substituted for the system's classes in
its algorithms.[5]

Reportedly, Java inventor James Gosling has spoken against implementation inheritance, stating that he would
not include it if he were to redesign Java.[16] Language designs that decouple inheritance from subtyping
(interface inheritance) appeared as early as 1990;[18] a modern example of this is the Go programming
language.

Complex inheritance, or inheritance used within an insufficiently mature design, may lead to the yo-yo
problem. When inheritance was used as a primary approach to structure code in a system in the late 1990s,
developers naturally started to break code into multiple layers of inheritance as the system functionality grew.
If a development team combined multiple layers of inheritance with the single responsibility principle it created
many super thin layers of code, many which would only have 1 or 2 lines of code in each layer. Before teams
learned the hard way that 2 or 3 layers was optimum number of layers balancing the benefit of code reuse
against the complexity increase with each layer, it was not uncommon to work on inheritance frameworks with
10 and up to 30 layers. For instance 30 layers made debugging a significant challenge simply to know which
layer needed debugged. PowerBuilder built one of the best code library that primarily used inheritance, it was
built with 3 to 4 layers. The number of layers in an inheritance library is critical and must be kept at or below 4
layers otherwise the library becomes too complex and time consuming to use.

Another issue with inheritance is that subclasses must be defined in code, which means that program users
cannot add new subclasses. Other design patterns (such as Entity–component–system) allow program users to
define variations of an entity at runtime.

See also
Archetype pattern
Circle–ellipse problem
Defeasible reasoning – Reasoning that is rationally compelling, though not deductively valid
Interface (computing) – Concept of computer science; point of interaction between two things
Method overriding
Mixin
Polymorphism (computer science)
Protocol
Role-oriented programming – Programming paradigm based on conceptual understanding of
objects
The Third Manifesto
Trait (computer programming)
Virtual inheritance

Notes
a. This is generally true only in statically-typed class-based OO languages, such as C++, C#,
Java, and Scala.

References
1. Johnson, Ralph (August 26, 1991). "Designing Reusable Classes" (https://www.cse.msu.edu/~
cse870/Input/SS2002/MiniProject/Sources/DRC.pdf) (PDF). www.cse.msu.edu.
2. Mike Mintz, Robert Ekendahl (2006). Hardware Verification with C++: A Practitioner's
Handbook. United States of America: Springer. p. 22. ISBN 978-0-387-25543-9.
3. Cook, William R.; Hill, Walter; Canning, Peter S. (1990). Inheritance is not subtyping. Proc. 17th
ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symp. on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL). pp. 125–
135. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.102.8635 (https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.10
2.8635). doi:10.1145/96709.96721 (https://doi.org/10.1145%2F96709.96721). ISBN 0-89791-
343-4.
4. Cardelli, Luca (1993). Typeful Programming (Technical report). Digital Equipment Corporation.
p. 32–33. SRC Research Report 45.
5. Mikhajlov, Leonid; Sekerinski, Emil (1998). A study of the fragile base class problem (http://extr
as.springer.com/2000/978-3-540-67660-7/papers/1445/14450355.pdf) (PDF). Proc. 12th
European Conf. on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP). Lecture Notes in Computer
Science. 1445. pp. 355–382. doi:10.1007/BFb0054099 (https://doi.org/10.1007%2FBFb005409
9). ISBN 978-3-540-64737-9.
 6. Tempero, Ewan; Yang, Hong Yul; Noble, James (2013). What programmers do with inheritance
in Java (https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ewan/qualitas/studies/inheritance/TemperoYangNoble
ECOOP2013-pre.pdf) (PDF). ECOOP 2013–Object-Oriented Programming. pp. 577–601.
7. "C++ Inheritance" (https://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~rth/cs/cs177/map/inheritd.html).
www.cs.nmsu.edu.
8. Bjarne Stroustrup. The Design and Evolution of C++. p. 417.
9. Herbert Schildt (2003). The complete reference C++ (https://archive.org/details/ccompleterefere
n00schi_178). Tata McGrawhill Education Private Limited. p. 417 (https://archive.org/details/cco
mpletereferen00schi_178/page/n450). ISBN 978-0-07-053246-5.
10. E Balagurusamy (2010). Object Orientedprogramming With C++. Tata McGrawhill Education
Pvt. Ltd. p. 213. ISBN 978-0-07-066907-9.
11. override(C# Reference) (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ebca9ah3.aspx)
12. "GotW #60: Exception-Safe Class Design, Part 2: Inheritance" (http://www.gotw.ca/gotw/060.ht
m). Gotw.ca. Retrieved 2012-08-15.
13. Dr. K. R. Venugopal, Rajkumar Buyya (2013). Mastering C++. Tata McGrawhill Education
Private Limited. p. 609. ISBN 9781259029943.
14. Cook, Hill & Canning 1990.
15. Mitchell, John (2002). "10 "Concepts in object-oriented languages" ". Concepts in programming
language (https://archive.org/details/conceptsprogramm00mitc). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press. p. 287 (https://archive.org/details/conceptsprogramm00mitc/page/n298).
ISBN 978-0-521-78098-8.
16. Holub, Allen (1 August 2003). "Why extends is evil" (http://www.javaworld.com/article/2073649/
core-java/why-extends-is-evil.html). Retrieved 10 March 2015.
17. Seiter, Linda M.; Palsberg, Jens; Lieberherr, Karl J. (1996). "Evolution of object behavior using
context relations" (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/research/demeter/papers/context-journal/_context.ht
ml). ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes. 21 (6): 46. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.36.5053 (https://
citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.36.5053). doi:10.1145/250707.239108 (http
s://doi.org/10.1145%2F250707.239108).
18. America, Pierre (1991). Designing an object-oriented programming language with behavioural
subtyping (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221501695). REX School/Workshop on
the Foundations of Object-Oriented Languages. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 489.
pp. 60–90. doi:10.1007/BFb0019440 (https://doi.org/10.1007%2FBFb0019440). ISBN 978-3-
540-53931-5.

Further reading
Object-Oriented Software Construction, Second Edition, by Bertrand Meyer, Prentice Hall,
1997, ISBN 0-13-629155-4, Chapter 24: Using Inheritance Well.
Implementation Inheritance Is Evil (https://medium.com/@wrong.about/inheritance-based-on-int
ernal-structure-is-evil-7474cc8e64dc)

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