Give the respective scientific terms used for studying : (i) the mechanism by which variations are created and inherited and (ii) the development of new type of organisms from the existing ones.
Answers
In object-oriented programming, inheritance is the mechanism of basing an object or class upon another object (prototypical inheritance) or class (class-based inheritance), retaining similar implementation. In most class-based object-oriented languages, an object created through inheritance (a "child object") acquires all the properties and behaviors of the parent object (except: constructors, destructor, overloaded operators and friend functions of the base class). Inheritance allows programmers to create classes that are built upon existing classes,[1] to specify a new implementation while maintaining the same behaviors (realizing an interface), to reuse code and to independently extend original software via public classes and interfaces. The relationships of objects or classes through inheritance give rise to a directed graph.
An inherited class is called a subclass of its parent class or super class. The term "inheritance" is loosely used for both class-based and prototype-based programming, but in narrow use the term is reserved for class-based programming (one class inherits from another), with the corresponding technique in prototype-based programming being instead called delegation (one object delegates to another).
Inheritance should not be confused with subtyping.[2][3] In some languages inheritance and subtyping agree,[a] whereas in others they differ; in general, subtyping establishes an is-a relationship, whereas inheritance only reuses implementation and establishes a syntactic relationship, not necessarily a semantic relationship (inheritance does not ensure behavioral subtyping). To distinguish these concepts, subtyping is also known as interface inheritance, whereas inheritance as defined here is known as implementation inheritance or code inheritance.[4] Still, inheritance is a commonly used mechanism for establishing subtype relationships.[5]
Inheritance is contrasted with object composition, where one object contains another object (or objects of one class contain objects of another class); see composition over inheritance. Composition implements a has-a relationship, in contrast to the is-a relationship of subtyping.