java of Ineritance and Polymorphism.doc

Inheritance and Polymorphism What is the best way to design these classes so to avoid redundancy? The answer is to use inheritance. This chapter focuses on discussing Inheritance and Polymorphism, and it contains twelve objectives that we should study. They are developing a subclass from a superclass through inheritance (?1.2), invoking the superclass抯 constructors and methods using the super keyword (?1.3), overriding instance methods in the subclass (?1.4), distinguishing differences between overriding and overloading (?1.5), exploring the toString() method in the Object class (?1.6), discovering polymorphism and dynamic binding (?1.7-11.8), describing casting and explain why explicit downcasting is necessary (?1.9), exploring the equals() method in the Object class (?1.10), storing, retrieving, and manipulating objects in an ArrayList (?1.11), implementing a Stack class using ArrayList (?1.12), restricting access to data and methods to subclasses using the protected visibility modifier (?1.13), prevent class extending and method overriding using the final modifier (?1.14). 11.2 Superclass and Subclass: In Java terminology, a class C1 extended from anther class C2 is called a subclass, and C2 is called a superclass. A superclass is also referred to as a parent class, or a base class, and a subclass as a child class, an extended class, or a derived class. A subclass inherits accessible data fields and methods from its superclass and may also add new data fields and methods. And superclass抯 constructor are not inherited. They are invoked explicitly or implicitly. The following points regarding inheritance are worthwhile to remember: 1 Contrary to the conventional interpretation, a subclass is not a subset of its super class. In fact, a subclass usually contains more information and methods than its superclass. 2 Private data fields in a superclass are not accessible outside the class. 3 Not all is-a relationships should be modeled using inheritan