Contributions of inheritance in software engineering

Contributions of inheritance in software engineering

What are the contributions of inheritance in software engineering using the Java language?

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The Java programming language was object-oriented from the time it was conceived, so it doesn't suffer from the problems you might encounter with some languages that tried to retrofit OOP features after-the-fact. In the area of inheritance, Java provides most of the standard features of an object-oriented language including:

  • The ability to extend a base class private, protected, and public scoped classes, fields, and methods
  • Method overloading and overriding
  • Abstract base classes and methods

    Some aberrations that you do not find with a lot of other object-oriented languages are:

  • The concept of package scope
  • Interface inheritance
  • Multiple inheritance is restricted to interfaces

    • This was first published in November 2004

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