Inheritance in MATLAB

Inheritance is the process of deriving a new class from an existing class. The new class inherits all the properties and methods of the existing class, and can also add its own properties and methods.

To use inheritance in MATLAB, you can do the following:

1. Define a superclass: This is the class from which you want to inherit properties and methods. For example, let's define a simple class called Rectangle that has two properties, length and width, and a method called area that calculates the area of the rectangle.

classdef Rectangle
    properties
        length
        width
    end
    
    methods
        function obj = Rectangle(l, w)
            obj.length = l;
            obj.width = w;
        end
        
        function a = area(obj)
            a = obj.length * obj.width;
        end
    end
end

2. Define a subclass: This is the new class that will inherit from the superclass. For example, let's define a class called Square that inherits from Rectangle and has an additional property called side.

classdef Square < Rectangle
    properties
        side
    end
    
    methods
        function obj = Square(s)
            obj = obj@Rectangle(s, s);
            obj.side = s;
        end
    end
end

Notice that in the definition of the Square class, we use the < symbol followed by the name of the superclass (Rectangle) to indicate that Square inherits from Rectangle.

Also notice that in the constructor of Square, we call the constructor of Rectangle using the @ symbol and pass in the side length twice (since a square has equal side lengths).

Now, we can create objects of both classes and call their methods:

rect = Rectangle(3, 4);
area = rect.area(); % Returns 12
sq = Square(5);

area = sq.area(); % Returns 25

By using inheritance, we were able to reuse the area method from the Rectangle class in the Square class without having to redefine it. We also added an additional property to the Square class (side) that was not present in the Rectangle class.