Book Image

Learning Object-Oriented Programming

By : Gaston C. Hillar
Book Image

Learning Object-Oriented Programming

By: Gaston C. Hillar

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning Object-Oriented Programming
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Understanding parametric polymorphism and duck typing


Let's imagine that we want to organize a party of specific animals. We don't want to mix cats with dogs because the party would end up with dogs chasing cats. We want a party, and we don't want intruders. However, at the same time, we want to take advantage of all the procedures we create to organize the party and replicate them with frogs in another party, a party of frogs. We want to reuse these procedures and use them for either dogs or frogs. However, in the future, we will probably want to use them with parrots, lions, tigers, and horses.

In C#, we can declare an interface to specify all the requirements for an animal and write generic code that works with any class that implements the interface. Parametric polymorphism allows you to write generic and reusable code that can work with values without depending on the type while keeping the full static type safety. We can take advantage of parametric polymorphism through generics, also...