JavaScript Inheritance
In my last post, I covered JavaScript Classes and now, I’ll continue with inheritance. JavaScript uses prototypal inheritance in contrast to classical. When a class is instantiated, it’s prototype is stored in __proto__ key of the object, which may in turn contain __proto__ from another parent class. This is called Prototype chaining. Lets have a look at what this means by an example.
The Base Class
Lets continue with the the example used in previous post. We a simple base class called Person
var Person = function (name, age){
this.name = name,
this.age = age
};
Person.prototype.greet = function(){
console.log('Hello, I\'m ' + this.name);
}
Inherited Student
Lets make a class called Student which inherits from Person
var Student = function(name,age){
this.name = name,
this.age = age
};
//Inheritance
Student.prototype = Person.prototype;
When you run the following code, you’ll notice that Student has inherited the greet method of the Person class and that __proto__ of both a and b contains greet method.
var a = new Person("li", 22);
a.greet(); // Hello, I'm li
console.log (a); //Person {name: "li", age: 22, greet: function}
var b = new Student("Joe", 20);
b.greet(); // Hello, I'm Joe
console.log(b); //Student {name: "Joe", age: 20, greet: function}
Now lets change the inheritance
Student.prototype = new Person();
And if you run the code again, you’ll see that similar results, but this time, __proto__ of b does not have the method greet but the __proto__ of __proto__ of b has the method greet.
var a = new Person("li", 22);
a.greet(); // Hello, I'm li
console.log (a); //Person {name: "li", age: 22, greet: function}
var b = new Student("Joe", 20);
b.greet(); // Hello, I'm Joe
console.log(b); //Student {name: "Joe", age: 20, greet: function}
What Changed?
When we set the Student.prototype to new Person(), a new instance of Person was assinged to it, which had greet in its __proto__ and when the Student was initialized, the prototype was assigned to its __proto__.
Conclusion
Don’t worry if you cannot get your head around this. It also took me a while to get hang of it. But once you understand it, it’s a very powerful tool.
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