Supertype?

If one class, e.g., Lawyer, extends another class, e.g., Employee, in an inheritance heirarchy then the former is called the subclass and the latter is called the superclass, and you can create objects like e below which are an Employee at compile time but a Lawyer at runtime:

Employee e = new Lawyer();

Employee is also said to be the type of e. In fact sometimes type is used as a synonym for class. So if a class is a superclass it could be called a supertype. That's not quite accurate, however, because interfaces are also types, so though classes are types, types are not necessarily classes.

So if I have understood from your comment that Employee is a Supertype Lawyer is a Subtype e is a ref. variabel to Emplyee which means that Lawyer cant reach Employee methods! Right? (well it can if I do type cast)