Question about inheritance

[Kaustav Ganguly]

I dont know if this question or doubt I am having is already answered before in this forum, so please excuse me if it has been or if it is a sily question. But I could not understand the behaviour of the following code snippets.

public class Test {   
	
	public int a = 10;
	
	public String b = "Test";
	
	public void getValues() {
		System.out.println(this.a + this.b);
	}

}


public class TestChild1 extends Test{
	
public int a = 20;
	
	public String b = "TestChild1";
	
	public void getValues() {
		System.out.println(this.a + this.b);
	}

}

public class Main {
	
	public static void main(String args[]) {
		Test test = new TestChild1();
		
		System.out.println(test.a + test.b);
		
		test.getValues();
	}

}

And the output was

10Test
20TestChild1

I could not understand why test.a and test.b would print the superclass value but when we invoke the method it is the other way round. Really confused.

[Campbell Ritchie]

Methods might be polymorphic, but fields aren't. Start with this FAQ, and if that doesn't help, ask again.

[Pranav Raulkar]

Hi Kaustav,
Casting an object to a parent class is called upcasting and is done automatically. If you upcast an object, it will lose all it's properties, which were inherited from below it's current position. Hence test.a and test.b prints out the parent data from its parent class. Note, that data will not be lost, you just can't use it, until you downcast to the right level. Why this behavior? Because in inheritance parent class knows nothing about its child class properties, but the child class knows about its parent data as it inherited it.

To overcome this, what you need to do is use polymormism. Polymorphism uses automatic downcast during method calls. Which is what happened in the getValues method (overriden method). As test contains a reference to child object it calls child's getValues (after downcasting) where trivially, the child data is printed.

[Kaustav Ganguly]

I understood that for static methods instance does no make any difference. But what for instance variable ? Instance variables are specific to a particular instance, why are they as per the declaration ?

[Campbell Ritchie]

Didn't it say anything about fields in the FAQ?

[Campbell Ritchie]

No, it didn't say anything about fields. Fields are hidden, rather like static members.