What Is Base Class?

There are many ways to be a parent you can be the kind of parent who gives your children everything they ever wanted and more, or you could be the kind of parent who gives them just enough to get by and then makes them earn their way in life. But what if you're not just a parent?What if you're also an object-oriented programming language? Well, then, it's time to bring out the big guns. It's time for a base class! A base class is a class—that's right, like a mom or dad—in an object-oriented programming language from which other classes are derived (like kids! ). It facilitates the creation of different classes that can reuse the code implicitly inherited from the base class (except constructors and destructors). A programmer can extend base class functionality by adding or overriding members relevant to the derived class. One of the most meaningful things about inheritance is that it's a two-way street. When you derive from a base class, you get data and behavior. It is why we can talk about "vehicle" as a base class and then say that cars and buses are both vehicles, but they each represent their specialization of the vehicle base class. Inheritance allows us to build up complex structures of related objects with the same characteristics but different values for each object. In object-oriented programming, base classes provide basic functionality-derived classes that can inherit. A base class has two main benefits: It can be automatically instantiated before a derived class is instantiated and can be used to communicate with its derived class during instantiation. To communicate with its derived class during instantiation, a base class uses the "this" keyword to pass data into the constructor of its derived class. The constructor for a derived class can also use this syntax to access members of its base class. Base classes can also define abstract methods, which prevent direct initiation using the "new" keyword. Abstract methods can only be overridden by their non-abstract derived classes, which must provide a concrete implementation of these methods. And sure, this sounds like a lot of work—but being a great parent takes work!