Inheritance

Inheritance is how we acquire traits from parents. Inheritance in system design leverages the power of types. General things have properties that we wish to confer on specializations. Inheritance is a mechanism to support this goal without extra work.

DNA is the inheritance mechanism of living things. It is so complex we can barely understand part of how it works.



The inheritance mechanism of software systems is not nearly so ambitious. Approaching it like people, it allows parent types to have attributes that are shared by all the children. Child types can have additional attributes that are shared by all their children. Adding an attribute to a grandparent type bestows it on all the grandchildren.

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