Overriding

Hi Clay,

The purpose of overriding a method in a subclass is when you need the method to behave differently in the subclass than it does in the parent class / other subclasses.

For example, let's assume you are writing a Triangle class and a Square class, both of which extend the Shape class, and you want to have a method that calculates and returns the area. Since each type of shape has a different formula for calculating area, you'd want to override the area method in each subclass. Each subclass would have it's own code for calculating/returning the area, while still being able to reuse code that applies to all subclasses of Shape.

A good example of a method that wouldn't need overriding would be something like getNumberOfSides, since numberOfSides could be defined as a field in the Shape class, and set to the appropriate number in your Triangle and Square constructors.