[MUSIC] Wow, we've covered a bunch of new stuff in these last few videos. You're doing great. We've learned all about object-oriented programming, and how to define our own classes and methods, including special methods like constructors or string conversions. We've also learned how to document them all. We're now going to talk about another aspect of object-oriented programming called inheritance. Just like people have parents, grandparents, and so on, objects have an ancestry. The principle of inheritance let's a programmer build relationships between concepts and group them together. In particular, this allows us to reduce code duplication by generalizing our code. For example, how could we develop our apple representation to include other types of fruit, too? Well, one thing we know about an apple is that it's a fruit. So we could define a separate fruit class. We also know that all fruits have a color and taste. So what if we moved our color and flavor attributes into the fruit class? Here, we have a fruit class with a constructor for the color and flavor attributes. Now, we can rewrite our apple class and easily add another fruit into the mix, too. In Python, we use parentheses in the class declaration to show an inheritance relationship. For our new fruit classes, we've used that syntax to tell our computer that both the apple and the grape classes inherit from the fruit class. Because of this, they automatically have the same constructor, which sets the color and flavor attributes. You can think of the fruit class as the parent class, and the apple and grape classes as siblings. Let's see this in action. First, we create an instance of the apple class. Granny_smith equals Apple. And we'll give it two parameters, green as the color and tart as the flavor. And now, an instance of the grape class. Then, to check that this actually worked, let's print the attributes values. With the inheritance technique, we can use the fruit class to store information that applies to all kinds of fruit, and keep apple or grape specific attributes in their own classes. For example, we could have an attribute to track how much of an apple is left after it's partially eaten. Of course, this applies to both attributes and methods. If a class has an attribute or a method defined in it, inheriting classes will have the same attributes and methods defined in them. But we can also get them to behave differently depending on what we change. To explore this, let's go back to our piglet example and change it so that there's a base animal class. In this code, we've defined a general class called animal, which has an attribute to store the sound that the animal makes. The constructor of the class takes the name that will be assigned to the instance when it's created. There's also a speak method that prints the name of the animal together with the sound the animal makes. Then, we have a piglet class that inherits from the animal class. We set the value of the sound attribute to oink in the piglet class, and that's the only thing we've modified from the original. Everything else is inherited. Let's see this in action. Let's define a new class that also inherits from animal. How about a cow class? Cool, and to finish, let's create an instance of this class to make it speak. So you can see that we can easily define new classes that inherit from the base animal class and use both the attributes and methods that the animal class provides. Pretty cool, right? Let's think of a different example, something closer to what you might be doing at your day-to-day job. In a system that handles the employees at your company, you may have a class called employee, which could have the attributes for things like full name of the person, the username used in company systems, the groups the employee belongs to, and so on. The employee class could have methods to do a bunch of things, like check if an employee belongs to a certain group, or create an email address based on the name and username attributes. The system could also have a manager class. A manager is an employee, but has additional information associated with it, like the employees that report to a specific manager. Are you starting to get an idea of the power of inheritance? Inheritance lets you reuse code written for one class in other classes. Next up, we're going to talk about a different way of reusing code.
