Inheritance is referred to as the act of inheriting something or when it’s passed down to someone else. In this tutorial, we’ll be looking at what inheritance is in Python. That is, how we can use it and how it’s being created. Inheritance in Python is the ability of a class to acquire or inherit properties from another class. The class it inherits is called base (or parent class) and the new class is called derived (or child) class.

The capability to inherit properties from another class helps to promote the reusability of code, whereby we don’t repeat code we’ve written earlier. Inheritance is also known as a powerful feature in object-oriented programming.

We’ll demonstrate different examples of how we can use inheritance in Python.

Single Inheritance

In Single inheritance, this is how a class can inherit from only a single parent class of which it has access to properties of the base class.

In the example below, we will demonstrate a basic example of how (we) a Student class is inheriting from the base class(Persons), which gave it access to elements in the base class.

1class Person:
2 def __init__(self, firstName, lastName):
3 self.fname=firstName
4 self.lname=lastName
5
6 def printname(self):
7 print(self.fname, self.lname)
8
9
10class Student(Person):
11 pass
12user = Student("Mike", "Johnson")
13user.printname()
14#Result
15Mike Johnson

Multiple Inheritance

Multiple Inheritance refers to how a class inherits from more than one base class and all features of the base classes are inherited into the derived class. This type of inheritance is called multiple inheritance.

In this example, we demonstrated with a bio-data information whereby we have 2 different base classes (Name, Age), which the Bdata inherited from and it also gain access to functions of both classes.

1# Base class1 
2class Name: 
3    PName = "" 
4    def Name(self): 
5        print(self.PName) 
6  
7# Base class2 
8class Age: 
9    Agevalue = "" 
10    def Age(self): 
11        print(self.Agevalue) 
12  
13# Derived class 
14class BData(Name, Age): 
15    def userData(self): 
16        print("Name :", self.PName) 
17        print("Age :", self.Agevalue) 
18 
19the_data = BData() 
20the_data.PName = "Grace" 
21the_data.Agevalue = "15" 
22the_data.userData()  
23
1#Result 
2Name : Grace 
3Age : 15

We have another example below, where we have the Base class

‘Intern’, ‘FullWorker’

 and also a child class

TeamLeader

 which inherits the 2 base class (

‘Intern’, ‘FullWorker’

) and gets to access all properties and elements of each of those classes.

2# Parent class 1 
3class Intern(object): 
4    def __init__(self, name): 
5        self.name = name  
6   
7# Parent class 2 
8class FullWorker(object): 
9    def __init__(self, salary, jobtitle):  
10        self.jobtitle = jobtitle  
11        self.salary = salary 
12   
13# Deriving a child class from the two parent classes 
14class TeamLeader(Intern, FullWorker): 
15    def __init__(self, name, jobtitle, salary, experience):  
16        self.experience = experience 
17        Intern.__init__(self, name)  
18        FullWorker.__init__(self, salary, jobtitle) 
19        print("Name: {}, Pay: {}, Exp: {}".format(self.name, self.salary, self.experience)) 
20 
21the_teamlead = TeamLeader('Bill','Data Engineer', 300000,  4)


1#Result 
2Name: Bill, Pay: 300000, Exp: 4

 

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