Inheritance Glossary

Browse 11 inheritance terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

11 Inheritance Terms

Code Genome
A playful metaphor for the recurring traits, conventions, and inherited structures that make a codebase recognizably itself. In engineering slang, the code...
Derived Type
A type that inherits from or extends a base type, gaining its properties and behaviors while potentially adding or overriding them. Common in Fortran, C++, and...
Method Override
A subclass providing its own implementation of a method already defined in a parent class, so that calls on the subclass instance execute the new behavior...
Method Resolution Order
The linearized sequence in which a language searches a class's inheritance hierarchy to find a method implementation, most famously computed in Python using...
Mixin
A class or module that provides methods to other classes through inclusion rather than inheritance, allowing horizontal code reuse without the constraints of a...
Override
To redefine a method inherited from a parent class in a subclass, replacing the parent's implementation with new behavior while preserving the same method...
Parent Class
A class from which another class (the child or subclass) inherits fields and methods, also called a superclass or base class. The parent class defines shared...
Prototype Chain
JavaScript's inheritance mechanism in which each object has an internal [[Prototype]] link to another object. When a property is accessed, the engine walks up...
Subclass
A class that inherits from another class (its superclass), gaining all of the parent's fields and methods while being able to override or extend them. A...
Super
A keyword in object-oriented languages (Java, JavaScript, Python, Swift, Kotlin) that refers to the parent class, used to call the superclass constructor...
Superclass
The parent class from which a subclass inherits its fields and methods. A superclass defines the shared interface and default behavior that all its descendants...

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