Inheritance is an important concept of OOP. It is common to have a bunch of objects implementing the same methods. It is also common to have an almost similar object definition with differences in a few methods. Inheritance is very useful in promoting code reuse. We can look at the following classic example of inheritance relation:
Here, you can see that from the generic Animal class, we derive more specific classes such as Mammal and Bird based on specific characteristics. Both the Mammal and Bird classes do have the same template of an Animal; however, they also define behaviors and attributes specific to them. Eventually, we derive a very specific mammal, Dog. A Dog has common attributes and behaviors from an Animal class and Mammal class, while it adds specific attributes and behaviors of a Dog. This can go on to add complex inheritance relationships.
Traditionally, inheritance is used to establish or describe an IS-A relationship. For example, a dog IS-A mammal. This is what...