Inheritance

Inheritance#

Inheritance allows you to create new classes that inherit attributes and methods from existing classes.

  • Parent Class (Superclass):

    • The parent class defines common attributes and methods.

  • Child Class (Subclass):

    • The child class inherits from the parent class and can have additional attributes and methods.

Example of inheritance:

# Parent class
class Animal:
    def __init__(self, name):
        self.name = name

    def speak(self):
        pass


# Child class inheriting from Animal
class Dog(Animal):
    def speak(self):
        return f"{self.name} says woof!"


my_dog = Dog("Buddy")
print(my_dog.speak())  # Calls the speak method of the Dog class

Mixins (multiple inheritance)#

Python allows you to inherit from multiple classes. While the technical term for this is multiple inheritance, many developers refer to the use of more than one base class adding a mixin. These are commonly used in frameworks such as Django.

Example of multiple inheritance:

class Loggable:
    def __init__(self):
        self.title = "

    def log(self):
        print("Log message from " + self.title)


class Connection:
    def __init__(self):
        self.server = "

    def connect(self):
        print("Connecting to database on " + self.server)


class SqlDatabase(Connection, Loggable):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()
        self.title = "Sql Connection Demo"
        self.server = "Some_Server"


def framework(item):
    if isinstance(item, Connection):
        item.connect()
    if isinstance(item, Loggable):
        item.log()


sql_connection = SqlDatabase()
framework(sql_connection)

Python Documentation#

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