Checkpoint 7

Paul Hudson    @twostraws    October 12th 2021

Updated for Xcode 15

Now that you understand how classes work, and, just as importantly, how they are different from structs, it’s time to tackle a small challenge to check your progress.

Your challenge is this: make a class hierarchy for animals, starting with Animal at the top, then Dog and Cat as subclasses, then Corgi and Poodle as subclasses of Dog, and Persian and Lion as subclasses of Cat.

But there’s more:

1. The Animal class should have a legs integer property that tracks how many legs the animal has.
2. The Dog class should have a speak() method that prints a generic dog barking string, but each of the subclasses should print something slightly different.
3. The Cat class should have a matching speak() method, again with each subclass printing something different.
4. The Cat class should have an isTame Boolean property, provided using an initializer.

I’ll provide some hints in a moment, but first I recommend you go ahead and try it yourself.

Still here? Okay, here are some hints:

1. You’ll need seven independent classes here, of which only one has no parent class.
2. To make one class inherit from another, write it like this: class SomeClass: OtherClass.
3. You can make subclasses have a different speak() method to their parent by using the override keyword.
4. All our subclasses have four legs, but you still need to make sure you pass that data up to the Animal class inside the Cat initializer.

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