INHERITANCE IN JAVA

INHERITANCE IN JAVA:

When one class called the derived class inherits the property of other class called the parent or base class is called Inheritance .

If class A is inherited from class B , it means that class A can access all the data members as well as methods of class  B and class A can also define its own data members and methods . Inherited class can have its own properties also in addition to the properties of parent class .

IN Object Oriented programming , Inheritance is of five types . C++ supports all these five types . However in JAVA Multiple inheritance is not supported .

We use keyword 'extends' to inherit  class  . 

Five types of Inheritance is :

We will explain these one by one .

SINGLE INHERITANCE  

 When a single derived class is inherited from single base class , such type of inheritance is called single inheritance . There is one base class and only one derived class .

Click here to see an example 

MULTILEVEL INHERITANCE

When another derived class is created from a Derived class such type of inheritance is called multilevel inheritance .

HIERARCHICAL INHERITANCE

In Hierarchical Inheritance , from one single base class , more than one derived classes are inherited .

That is more than one class inherits the properties of one base class .

MULTIPLE INHERITANCE

In multiple inheritance class , one derived class is inherited from two base classes . A single class inherits the methods and data members of two classes . 

 JAVA , does not support multiple Inheritance . Now the question arises :

Why multiple inheritance is not supported in JAVA ?

In multiple programming properties of classes are inherited by same class  . If both the base classes have a same function and we call this function in main , then which out of two function will be called ? Due to this ambiguity , multiple inheritance was removed by java Developers . In languages like C++ , this type of problem is solved by the concept of  Virtual functions which is not supported in JAVA . 

Note that even if both the bases classes do not have same function then also multiple inheritance is not possible in JAVA .

HYBRID INHERITANCE

Combination of above defined inheritances is called Hybrid inheritance . IN JAVA hybrid inheritance is possible but with a condition that there should be no multiple inheritance anywhere .