EBoard 13: Inheritance

Warning This class is being recorded. At least I think it is.

Approximate overview

• Administrivia
• About MP4
• Questions
• Lab

Administrivia

Introductory notes

• Warning! Today is Friday the 13th (class).
• Congratulations to our Grinnellian of the week!
• If it looks like VSCode is spending forever Java stuff, click on the “see more” link (something like that) and then close the box that appears.
• Today is (almost) our last day on Java. Starting next week, we’ll be using Java to build ADTs, Data Structures, and Algorithms.
• MP4 released.

Upcoming Token activities

Academic

• Mentor session Sunday at 4pm.

Cultural

• Book talk Thursday W@G

Peer

Wellness

Misc

Upcoming work

• Monday: No reading, today’s lab

Friday PSA

MP4

See the assignment.

Yay! Fun!

Questions

You can ask questions about anything related to the class! Self gov says that you should ask those questions.

Java

Administrative stuff

In CSC-161, we got detailed instructions for each assignment, laying out each thing we were supposed to do. Here, we get vague generalities. That’s hard!

It’s at least partially intentional. I want you to get used to (a) dealing with incomplete specifications and (b) asking questions. As I hope class on Wednesday suggested, I’m happy to spend time in class answering questions.

It sucks that there are people who know much more than me here.

It does. I hope that things balance out as the semester progresses. We move on to algorithms and data structures next week.

We’ll talk more about the power dynamics of this later.

Exceptions

Inheritance

Lab

  // Assume DecrementableCounter extends BasicCounter and
  // BasicCounter implements Counter.  Is this legal?
  Counter gamma = new DecrementableCounter(10);
  // However, we cannot treat gamma as a DecrementableCounter
  // (we can't access the method).

Inheritance basics you might have learned …

• When you call a method on an object in a subclass, and the subclass does not implement the method, we get the method from the superclass.
• When you call a method on an object in a subclass, and the subclass does implement the method, we get the method from the subclass.
• (Similar with fields.)
• You can use a member of a subclass anywhere you can use a member of its superclass. (That’s subtype polymorphism in action.)

Things you might have learned that often trip up students …

• In deciding what methods you can call, Java relies on the declared type of an object.
• In deciding what version of the method you do call, Java relies on the actual type of the object.
• Java insists that we call the constructor of the superclass implicitly (zero-parameter) or explicitly.
• That call must be the first thing in the constructor.