Summary

Both inheritance and composition allow you to create a new type from existing types. Typically, however, you use composition to reuse existing types as part of the underlying implementation of the new type and inheritance when you want to reuse the interface. Since the derived class has the base-class interface, it can be upcast to the base, which is critical for polymorphism, as you’ll see in the next chapter.

Despite the strong emphasis on inheritance in object-oriented programming, when you start a design you should generally prefer composition during the first cut and use inheritance only when it is clearly necessary. (As you’ll see in the next chapter.) Composition tends to be more flexible. In addition, by using the added artifice of inheritance with your member type, you can change the exact type, and thus the behavior, of those member objects at run-time. Therefore, you can change the behavior of the composed object at run-time.

Although code reuse through composition and inheritance is helpful for rapid project development, you’ll generally want to redesign your class hierarchy before allowing other programmers to become dependent on it. Your goal is a hierarchy in which each class has a specific use and is neither too big (encompassing so much functionality that it’s unwieldy to reuse) nor annoyingly small (you can’t use it by itself or without adding functionality). Your finished classes should be easily reused.

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