**Inheritance's** main idea is to use already defined classes and produce new ones by improving and extending some other classes.

Some class `Animal` contains all common attributes and methods for all animals. The `Cat` class inherits the `Animal` class.

class Animal:
  pass

# Inheriting the Animal class
class Cat(Animal):
  pass

print(Animal)
print(Cat)

## Note

 - The common class (that is inherited by other classes) is called a **superclass** or **parent class**;
 - The class that inherits is called a **child class**;
 - The child class has all the same methods and attributes that parents have and can have additional ones, but not vice versa;
 - Each class in Python can have multiple parent classes and/or children's classes;
 - Each class in Python is a children's class of `Object` class.

The object-oriented paradigm allows developers to create and structure programs using objects with predefined behavior. This is a widely used style of software organization that is easy for the development team to understand. Like most other programming languages, Python supports and implements this paradigm.

The first step is to understand the key statements. Classes, objects, attributes, methods...

Encapsulation provides access to the methods and attributes of the class.

Inheritance's main idea is to use already defined classes and produce new ones by improving and extending some other classes.

This OOP principle allows the user to change the parent class functionality and adapt it to the children's class.

Object-Oriented Programming in Python

Inheritance

Note