According to the AI road map I’ve been following, this and the rest of the concepts in this folder are meant to be considered more advanced concepts. Some of these have been covered in the Python Tutorial, some have not. This is the starting note, but I won’t link these concepts together unless necessary, as the concepts aren’t explicitly tied together.

What is Inheritance?

Inheritance is the concept that you can build a new class based off of, or derived from, an existing class. You can actually build one based off many, and the syntax is as follows;

class NewClass(BaseClass, AnotherClass):
	<statement-1>
	...
	<statement-n>

Remember, we use capital letter for our class names in this instance not because we have too, but because it’s best practice.

The new class has access to the same class methods as the original base class(es), as well as any new methods created in the new class definition. You could even override base methods, for multiple different reasons.

Let’s look at a really basic example I came up with;

class Person:  
    def __init__(self, name, age):  
        self.name = name  
        self.age = age  
        self.goals = []  
  
    def __repr__(self):  
        return f"My name is {self.name} and my age is {self.age}"  
  
    def print_goals(self):  
        print("I'd really like to...")  
        for goal in self.goals:  
            print(goal)  
  
class Student(Person):  
    def __init__(self, name, age):  
        super().__init__(name, age)  
        self.goals = ["Finish School!"]

We have a starter class, Person. Person has three methods, __init__, __repr__, and print_goals. We created an additional class, Student, who only has an __init__ method that overrides the Person classes own __init__. This is done to ensure every student created, has a default goal set to "Finish School!". An arbitrary example, but it does the job.

Another important note is that any Student object will have access to print_goals, since that method exists in the parent class.