Inheritance is a mechanism in Kotlin that allows a class to inherit properties and behaviors from another class. This helps to reduce code duplication and makes the code more manageable. To use inheritance in classes in Kotlin, we use the : (colon) symbol followed by the name of the parent class.
Here is an example of inheritance in Kotlin:
open class Animal {
open fun makeSound() {
println("The animal is making a sound")
}
}
class Dog : Animal() {
override fun makeSound() {
println("The dog is barking")
}
}
In this example, we have two classes - Animal and Dog. The Animal class is the parent class and Dog is the child class. The Dog class inherits properties and methods from the Animal class using the : symbol.
The Animal class has a single method makeSound which is marked as open. The open keyword indicates that this method can be overridden in child classes.
The Dog class overrides the makeSound method and prints 'The dog is barking' instead of the generic 'The animal is making a sound'.
This is a simple example, but inheritance in Kotlin can be used for more complicated scenarios with many levels of inheritance.