Let’s say you are driving to a friend’s house for the first time, and the address given to you is 245 Front Street in Mill City. Upon reaching Mill City, you take out your map, only to discover that Mill City actually has two different Front Streets across town from …
To address some common challenges with inheritance, there are two special identifiers: override and final. Note that these identifiers are not considered keywords — they are normal identifiers that have special meaning in certain contexts. Although final isn’t used very much, override is a fantastic addition that you should use …
Inheritance allows us to model an is-a relationship between two objects. The object being inherited from is called the parent class, base class, or superclass. The object doing the inheriting is called the child class, derived class, or subclass. When a derived class inherits from a base class, the derived …
In this chapter, we learned about some different kinds of relationships between two objects. Summary The process of building complex objects from simpler ones is called object composition. There are two types of object composition: composition, and aggregation. Composition exists when a member of a class has a part-of relationship …
So, you’ve written a program, it compiles, and it even appears to work! What now? Well, it depends. If you’ve written your program to be run once and discarded, then you’re done. In this case, it may not matter that your program doesn’t work for every case — if it …
So far, we’ve explored 3 types of relationships: composition, aggregation, and association. We’ve saved the simplest one for last: dependencies. In casual conversation, we use the term dependency to indicate that an object is reliant upon another object for a given task. For example, if you break your foot, you …
In the previous two lessons, we’ve looked at two types of object composition, composition and aggregation. Object composition is used to model relationships where a complex object is built from one or more simpler objects (parts). In this lesson, we’ll take a look at a weaker type of relationship between …
Life is full of recurring patterns, relationships, and hierarchies between objects. By exploring and understanding these, we can gain insight into how real-life objects behave, enhancing our understanding of those objects. For example, let’s say one day you’re walking down the street, and you see a bright yellow object attached …
In this chapter, we explored topics related to operator overloading, as well as overloaded typecasts, and topics related to the copy constructor. Summary Operator overloading is a variant of function overloading that lets you overload operators for your classes. When operators are overloaded, the intent of the operators should be …
The assignment operator (operator=) is used to copy values from one object to another already existing object. Assignment vs Copy constructor The purpose of the copy constructor and the assignment operator are almost equivalent — both copy one object to another. However, the copy constructor initializes new objects, whereas the …
