Week 8: Inherit this!

This week I chose to write about the first part of A2...the regex trees.

To be honest, the first time I sat down to do some coding, I was barely making use of having a superclass even though I knew that the assignment was on inheritance. It took me 3 or 4 instances of copy-pasting chunks of code and only making minor changes to them before I finally stopped trying to plough on through the assignment. Even though I conceptually understood the importance and usefulness of inheritance in creating classes, I wasn't applying it. My code would have most certainly worked, I have no doubt, but then what would have been the point of learning and understanding inheritance if I wasn't going to use it?

In hindsight, it was funny to see the way I thought I had a good grip on inheritance and yet there I was, happily writing lines and lines of duplicate code. In the end (thankfully!), I found a way to make some serious use of my superclass and also learned a bit more about how I should be thinking when I'm trying to use inheritance. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it most certainly pays off to actually try applying the concepts we've learned on our own, even when we think we fully understand something.

On to Exercise 3 this weekend I suppose, so wish me luck!