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inheritance

The document explains the concept of inheritance in Python, detailing how derived classes can be defined and how they interact with base classes. It covers method resolution, the ability to override methods, and the use of built-in functions like isinstance() and issubclass(). Additionally, it discusses multiple inheritance and the complexities of method resolution order in such cases.

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5 views

inheritance

The document explains the concept of inheritance in Python, detailing how derived classes can be defined and how they interact with base classes. It covers method resolution, the ability to override methods, and the use of built-in functions like isinstance() and issubclass(). Additionally, it discusses multiple inheritance and the complexities of method resolution order in such cases.

Uploaded by

mdhasan.ansari
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Inheritance

Of course, a language feature would not be worthy of the name “class” without supporting inher-
itance. The syntax for a derived class definition looks like this:

class DerivedClassName(BaseClassName):
<statement-1>
.
.
.
<statement-N>

The name BaseClassName must be defined in a namespace accessible from the scope containing
the derived class definition. In place of a base class name, other arbitrary expressions are also
allowed. This can be useful, for example, when the base class is defined in another module:

class DerivedClassName(modname.BaseClassName):

Execution of a derived class definition proceeds the same as for a base class. When the class ob-
ject is constructed, the base class is remembered. This is used for resolving attribute references:
if a requested attribute is not found in the class, the search proceeds to look in the base class.
This rule is applied recursively if the base class itself is derived from some other class.

There’s nothing special about instantiation of derived classes: DerivedClassName() creates a


new instance of the class. Method references are resolved as follows: the corresponding class at-
tribute is searched, descending down the chain of base classes if necessary, and the method ref-
erence is valid if this yields a function object.

Derived classes may override methods of their base classes. Because methods have no special
privileges when calling other methods of the same object, a method of a base class that calls an-
other method defined in the same base class may end up calling a method of a derived class
that overrides it. (For C++ programmers: all methods in Python are effectively virtual.)

An overriding method in a derived class may in fact want to extend rather than simply replace
the base class method of the same name. There is a simple way to call the base class method
directly: just call BaseClassName.methodname(self, arguments). This is occasionally useful to
clients as well. (Note that this only works if the base class is accessible as BaseClassName in the
global scope.)

Python has two built-in functions that work with inheritance:

 Use isinstance() to check an instance’s type: isinstance(obj, int) will


be True only if obj.__class__ is int or some class derived from int.
 Use issubclass() to check class inheri-
tance: issubclass(bool, int) is True since bool is a subclass of int. However, is-
subclass(float, int) is False since float is not a subclass of int.
9.5.1. Multiple Inheritance

Python supports a form of multiple inheritance as well. A class definition with multi-
ple base classes looks like this:

class DerivedClassName(Base1, Base2, Base3):


<statement-1>
.
.
.
<statement-N>
For most purposes, in the simplest cases, you can think of the search for attributes in-
herited from a parent class as depth-first, left-to-right, not searching twice in the same
class where there is an overlap in the hierarchy. Thus, if an attribute is not found
in DerivedClassName, it is searched for in Base1, then (recursively) in the base classes
of Base1, and if it was not found there, it was searched for in Base2, and so on.

In fact, it is slightly more complex than that; the method resolution order changes dy-
namically to support cooperative calls to super(). This approach is known in some
other multiple-inheritance languages as call-next-method and is more powerful than
the super call found in single-inheritance languages.

Dynamic ordering is necessary because all cases of multiple inheritance exhibit one or
more diamond relationships (where at least one of the parent classes can be accessed
through multiple paths from the bottommost class). For example, all classes inherit
from object, so any case of multiple inheritance provides more than one path to
reach object. To keep the base classes from being accessed more than once, the dy-
namic algorithm linearizes the search order in a way that preserves the left-to-right or-
dering specified in each class, that calls each parent only once, and that is monotonic
(meaning that a class can be subclassed without affecting the precedence order of its
parents). Taken together, these properties make it possible to design reliable and ex-
tensible classes with multiple inheritance. For more detail, see The Python 2.3
Method Resolution Order.

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