Lecture 6

Object-oriented Programming

Subclasses and inheritance II

MCS 275 Spring 2022
David Dumas

Lecture 6: Subclasses and inheritance II

• Homework 2 is due at Noon tomorrow (Tue Jan 26).
• Project 1 will be posted today, due Fri 4 Feb at 6pm.
• Wear a well-fitting mask completely covering nose and mouth when in classroom.

Plan

Finish our robot simulation class hierarchy

Discuss more OOP theory & practice

Planned Bot hierarchy

• PatrolBot walks back and forth.
• WanderBot walks about randomly.
• DestructBot sits in one place for a while and then self-destructs.

Class attributes

Attributes declared in the class definition, outside of any method, are class attributes.

Class attributes are shared by every instance of the class. Often used for constants.

Contrast with the instance attributes we have used thus far (e.g. self.x = 1 in constructor) which exist separately for each instance.

Four pillars of OOP

• Encapsulation - Classes manage their own private, internal state.
• Abstraction - Method calls express intent (independent of implementation).
• Inheritance - Distinct classes can share behavior.
• Polymorphism - Code using a class will also work on its subclasses.

Extending the simulation

Beyond adding more robot types, how might me improve or extend the simulation?

Extending the simulation

Might create a class Arena that manages the list of bots and the space in which they move. Would have a single .update() method that updates all bots.

Each bot would know what Arena it is in, and could call methods of Arena to interrogate surroundings (e.g. avoid collision, seek other bots, ...)