Inheritance, Polymorphism, and Abstract Classes

Lesson Overview: A class represents a set of objects that share the same structure and behaviors. The class determines the structure of objects by specifying variables that are contained in each instance of the class, and it determines behavior by providing the instance methods that express the behavior of the objects. This is a powerful idea. However, something like this can be done in most programming languages. The central new idea in object-oriented programming is to allow classes to express the similarities among objects that share some, but not all, of their structure and behavior. Such similarities can be expressed using inheritance and polymorphism.

Lesson Vocab