Inheritance and Type Safety
Enhance your Python OOP skills with essential decorators: @abstractmethod for subclass method enforcement, @final to prevent method overrides, and @override for clear refactoring. Ideal for creating robust, maintainable code. Subscribe for the latest in Python programming expertise.
© 2023 The Turing Taco Tales / Oscar Mauricio Forero Carrillo
Originally published at The Turing Taco Tales on December 24, 2023.
Overview
Inheritance, a cornerstone of object-oriented programming (OOP), enables code reuse by allowing us to declare a parent class when writing new classes. The child class will be a subtype with all the capabilities of the parent and any new methods we define on it.
However, this introduces potential pitfalls, like how to ensure a method that has to be specialized is specialized in all the subclasses. Or the opposite, how to ensure a subclass never overrides a function. Or how to ensure that the overriding relationships are maintained when code evolves.
In this article, we’ll discuss three essential decorators that will help us write more robust class hierarchies and facilitate refactoring efforts, pointing out code that could break if we remove or modify methods in a base class.
