Discuss the ways in which inheritance promotes software reuse, saves time during program development and helps prevent errors.

Answer

Inheritanceallowsdeveloperstocreatederivedclassesthatreusecodedeclaredalready in a base class.

Avoiding the duplication of common functionality between several classes by building an inheritance hierarchy to contain the classes can save developers a considerable amount of time.

Similarly, placing common functionality in a single base class, rather than duplicating the code in multiple unrelated classes, helps pre- vent the same errors from appearing in multiple source-code files.

If several classes each contain duplicate code containing an error, the software developer has to spend time correcting each source-code file with the error.

However, if these classes take ad- vantage of inheritance, and the error occurs in the common functionality of the base class, the software developer needs to modify only the base class’s code.