Motivation for Inheritance

The key word to understand why inheritance is an important topic is leverage. Inheritance is a primary tool that permits us to leverage the creation of new software components from existing software components, or to simplify the task of creating a family of related new components.

By providing a leverage tool, this permits an improvement in productivity.

Since inheritance will permit us to reuse existing, and hence already tested, software components, we can achive improvements in quality, consistency and reliability.

[audio] [real] Text to accompany slide2, in Chapter 7 of An Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming