Superclass (computer science)

As a base class, upper class, super class (from English super class ), parent class or parent class (from English parent class ) is called in object-oriented programming classes which inherit their attributes and methods to derived classes.

In particular, the term base class is intended to illustrate that sometimes it's derived classes of the base for more of her and at the same time has no own base classes, which then means that the base class always has the highest, in terms of top-down, is defined class in their class hierarchy. But it can also be more than one base class, which then independently found a network of sub-classes. Thus, a systematic scale collection is also called class library.

A base class can be declared as abstract base class be (English abstract base class, ABC for short ) and prohibit the direct instantiation in the case of abstract classes. It then serves solely to summarize, the abstraction of attributes and methods of classes derived from it.