Ruby - Inheritance
| | Ruby user's guide | Inheritance | |
Our classification of objects in everyday life is naturally
hierarchical. We know that all cats are mammals, and
all mammals are animals. Smaller classes inherit
characteristics from the larger classes to which they belong. If
all mammals breathe, then all cats breathe.
We can express this concept in ruby:
ruby> class Mammal
| def breathe
| print "inhale and exhale\n"
| end
| end
nil
ruby> class Cat<Mammal
| def speak
| print "Meow\n"
| end
| end
nil |
Though we didn't specify how a Cat should breathe, every
cat will inherit that behavior from the Mammal class since
Cat was defined as a subclass of Mammal. (In
OO terminology, the smaller class is a subclass and the larger
class is a superclass.) Hence from a programmer's
standpoint, cats get the ability to breathe for free; after we add a
speak method, our cats can both breathe and speak.
ruby> tama = Cat.new
#<Cat:0xbd80e8>
ruby> tama.breathe
inhale and exhale
nil
ruby> tama.speak
Meow
nil |
There will be situations where certain properties of the superclass
should not be inherited by a particular subclass. Though birds
generally know how to fly, penguins are a flightless subclass of
birds.
ruby> class Bird
| def preen
| print "I am cleaning my feathers."
| end
| def fly
| print "I am flying."
| end
| end
nil
ruby> class Penguin<Bird
| def fly
| fail "Sorry. I'd rather swim."
| end
| end
nil |
Rather than exhaustively define every characteristic of every
new class, we need only to append or to redefine the differences
between each subclass and its superclass. This use of
inheritance is sometimes called differential programming.
It is one of the benefits of object-oriented programming.
