Month: June 2016

Consider test-driving a new car, of a make and model you’re not familiar with. It’s unlikely you’ll need any instruction in how to do it: rightmost pedal makes the car go, pedal next to it makes the car stop. Even though there are many different cars, they have a reasonably consistent interface that allows most people to drive most cars. Subclassing Car Suppose we want to implement this in code. Let’s say I want to use a Camry object. A Camry “is a” car, so it makes sense that the Camry class inherits (possibly indirectly) from the Car class. We would never actually instantiate a generic “car” object, so Car can be an abstract class. What methods would Car have? Two obvious ones could be ApplyGas and ApplyBrake. Maybe they’re implemented something like this: In this case, the comments are standing in for some code that physically allows more gas into the engine or applies the brakes. This works fine….as long as every car works exactly the same way. But what happens if we have, for example, a Prius? Now stomping on the gas pedal may or may not actually be sending more gas to the engine, which means that we need to override the behavior in the derived class. More generally, for each type of car that derives from the Car class and uses different hardware, we’ll need...