Inheritance refers to using the structure and behavior of a superclass in a subclass. Polymorphism refers to changing the behavior of a superclass in the subclass.v<\/p>\n
Inheritance is more a static thing (one class extends another) while polymorphism is a dynamic\/ runtime thing (an object behaves according to its dynamic\/ runtime type not to its static\/ declaration type).<\/p>\n
Inheritance is when a ‘class’ derives from an existing ‘class’. So if you have a Person class, then you have a Student class that extends Person, Student inherits all the things that Person has. <\/p>\n
Polymorphism deals with how the program decides which methods it should use, depending on what type of thing it has. If you have a Person, which has a read method, and you have a Student which extends Person, which has its own implementation of read, which method gets called is determined for you by the runtime, depending if you have a Person or a Student<\/p>\n
Person p = new Student();
\np.read();<\/p>\n
The read method on Student gets called. Thats the polymorphism in action. You can do that assignment because a Student is a Person, but the runtime is smart enough to know that the actual type of p is Student.<\/p>\n
The main difference is polymorphism is a specific result of inheritance. Polymorphism is where the method to be invoked is determined at runtime based on the type of the object. This is a situation that results when you have one class inheriting from another and overriding a particular method. However, in a normal inheritance tree, you don’t have to override any methods and therefore not all method calls have to be polymorphic<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Inheritance refers to using the structure and behavior of a superclass in a subclass. Polymorphism refers to changing the behavior of a superclass in the subclass.v Inheritance is more a static thing (one class extends another) while polymorphism is a dynamic\/ runtime thing (an object behaves according to its dynamic\/ runtime type not to its… Continue reading