Python: Essential Reference, Third Edition

Inheritance

Inheritance is a mechanism for creating a new class that specializes or modifies the behavior of an existing class. The original class is called a base class or a superclass. The new class is called a derived class or a subclass. When a class is created via inheritance, it “inherits” the attributes defined by its base classes. However, a derived class may redefine any of these attributes and add new attributes of its own.

Inheritance is specified with a comma-separated list of base-class names in the class statement. If there is no logical base class, a class inherits from object, as has been shown in prior examples. object is an abstract type that is the root of all Python objects and provides the default implementation of common ...