Transitive Relation?

  • Describe multi-level inheritance.

Exercise Would it be possible to create a chain of inheritance relationships as in the following example?

(a) Yes
(b) No

Solution

Yes! Inheritance is transitive. If GradStudent is a sub-class of Student and PhdStudent is a sub-class of GradStudent, then PhdStudent is also a sub-class of Student.

The chain of inheritance relationships is known as "multi-level inheritance" (where a sub-class is inherited from another sub-class).

Multi-level inheritance is supported in Java.