Can you override constructors in java

In Inheritance practice you need to create two classes with different names hence two constructors must have different names. So constructor overriding is not possible and that thought not even make sense.

Your example is not an override. Overrides technically occur in a subclass, but in this example the contructor method is replaced in the original class. It should also be noted that you can't override the constructor in the subclass with the constructor of the superclass's name.

The rule of OOPS tells that a constructor should have name as its class name. If we try to override the superclass constructor it will be seen as an unknown method without a return type. While others have pointed out it is not possible to override constructors syntactically, I would like to also point out, it would be conceptually bad to do so. Say the superclass is a dog object, and the subclass is a Husky object.

The dog object has properties such as "4 legs", "sharp nose", if "override" means erasing dog and replacing it with Husky then Husky would be missing these properties and be a broken object. Husky never had those properties and simply inherited them from dog. On the other hand, if you intend to give Husky everything that dog has, then conceptually you could "override" dog with Husky, but there would be no point in creating a class that is the same as dog, it's not practically an inherited class but a complete replacement.

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Is Constructor Overriding Possible? Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 8 months ago. Active 9 months ago. Viewed k times. Improve this question. Saurabh Gokhale Gopal Gopal 2 2 gold badges 8 8 silver badges 19 19 bronze badges. Add a comment.

The usage of super in the constructor is similar to the use of keyword this. To use super in the constructor of sub-class, a constructor with the same signature must exist in the super-class. A constructor in the super-class with exactly the same signature as the constructor in the sub-class need not be called from the sub-class.

Only those constructors for which values need to be initialized in the sub-class should be called. The programmer can therefore simply create sub-classes that have constructors with entirely different signatures from any of the super-class constructors. Program illustrates how this can be done. Using constructors with different signatures in the sub-class and super-class. In our complete software, we just need to pass a list of employees everywhere and call appropriate methods without even knowing the type of employee.

For example, we can easily raise the salary of all employees by iterating through the list of employees. If you like GeeksforGeeks and would like to contribute, you can also write an article using write. See your article appearing on the GeeksforGeeks main page and help other Geeks. Please write comments if you find anything incorrect, or you want to share more information about the topic discussed above.

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Constructors in Java. Examples and practices described in this page don't take advantage of improvements introduced in later releases and might use technology no longer available. If your method overrides one of its superclass's methods, you can invoke the overridden method through the use of the keyword super. You can also use super to refer to a hidden field although hiding fields is discouraged.

Consider this class, Superclass :. Within Subclass , the simple name printMethod refers to the one declared in Subclass , which overrides the one in Superclass.