Hi there 👋 I'm a New York City based web developer documenting my journey with React, React Native, and Python for all to see. Please follow my dev.to profile or my twitter for updates and feel free to reach out if you have questions. Thanks for your support!
Today we follow up on a series of posts about Object Oriented Programming in Python. You can check out yesterday's article here.
We've been talking about inheritance in OOP recently, and yesterday's blog post discussed how a child class can inherit variables and methods from a parent class. This is useful if you want the same behavior in a child that a parent has.
But what if you want different behavior in the child class than a parent has, but want to inherit everything else? This is where polymorphism comes in.
Let's say you have an Organism class. Just like in biology, all animals and plants are types of organisms. So we might have a eat() method on the organism class (all organisms like to eat!).
On the parent Organism class the eat method look like this:
class Organism:
def __init__(self, name):
self.name = name
def eat(calories):
print(f"{self.name} ate a meal of {calories} calories")
In the above class, we have a constructor function where we can pass in a name and an instance variable name that we set it to. So now our organism has a name! In the eat method, we pass in a number of calories and our method prints out how many calories it ate.
Let's say our organism is a plant. Plants don't eat food like you and I do, instead they get their food from the sun and convert it to energy. So eating calories doesn't make sense for a Plant class, even if it inherits from the Organism class. So instead we want to inherit everything else from Organism but the eat() method should accept a hours_of_sunlight argument instead of calories.
Our Plant class might look like this:
class Plant(Organism):
def __init__(self, name, type):
super().__init__(name)
self.type = type
def eat(hours_of_sunlight):
print(f"The {self.type} plant converted {hours_of_sunlight} hours of sunlight into energy!")
In the above example, the Plant class calls the parent's constructor function using super().__init__() in its constructor, thereby inheriting the name variable and setting it, which is awesome!. We also set a new instance variable called type where we can pass in things like "palm tree" or "sunflower" or "green ivy".
After creating an instance of Plant the eat method would be available on it the instance because it would come from the parent. But as we said we want the Plant class' eat method to be different! So to do this we simply create a new method on the Plant class with the same name- eat().
Now, when an instance of Plant is created and its eat method is called, instead of printing a line about how many calories it consumed, we describe how many hours of sunlight it converted into energy!
This ability to selectively inherit data and methods from the parent but also take on a new form if need be, by overwriting methods and variables inherited from the parent, is called polymorphism.
If you like projects like this and want to stay up to date with more, check out my Twitter @stonestwebdev, I follow back! See you tomorrow for another project.
Top comments (0)