Suppose we are developing a program that a car dealership can use to manage its inventory of used cars. The dealership’s inventory includes three types of automobiles: cars, pickup trucks, and sport-utility vehicles (SUVs). Regardless of the type, the dealership keeps the following data about each automobile:
• Make
• Year model
• Mileage
• Price
Each type of vehicle that is kept in inventory has these general characteristics, plus its own specialized characteristics. For cars, the dealership keeps the following additional data:
• Number of doors (2 or 4)
For pickup trucks, the dealership keeps the following additional data:
• Drive type (two-wheel drive or four-wheel drive)
And, for SUVs, the dealership keeps the following additional data:
• Passenger capacity
In designing this program, one approach would be to write the following three classes:
• A Car class with attributes for the make, year model, mileage, price, and number of doors.
• A Truck class with attributes for the make, year model, mileage, price, and drive type.
• An SUV class with attributes for the make, year model, mileage, price, and passenger
capacity.

This would be an inefficient approach, however, because all three classes have a large number of common data attributes. As a result, the classes would contain a lot of duplicated code. In addition, if we discover later that we need to add more common attributes, we would have to modify all three classes.

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

class Automobile string make int yearmodel float mileage float price ... View the full answer