Thread: Help with inheritance

Hey guys. I am practicing with inheritance and was trying a simple exercise. It consists of writing a super class Person with subclass Student. The person has a name and year of birth, while the student has a major he is studying. When I write the Student class I get an error in the constructor and don't know what it is. It is probably very simple. Could anyone help?

package Problem11Persons;
 
public class Person
{
	private String name;
	private int year;
 
	public Person(String aName, int aYear)
	{
		name = aName;
		year = aYear;
	}
 
	public String toString()
	{
		//"Person is:" + name + "Date of birth is:" + birth;
		return "Person is:" + name + "Date of birth is:" + year;
	}
 
}

package Problem11Persons;
 
class Student extends Person
{
	private String major;
 
	public Student(String aMajor) // error here
	{
		major = aMajor;
	}
}

A subclass's constructor will *always* call the super class's constructor either explicitly where you write a call to super(...) at the start of the child's constructor, or implicitly. If it is done implicitly, it will call the super class's default or parameterless constructor. Your Student class's constructor doesn't call the super's constructor, and fails when it tries to implicitly call the default parameterless constructor since it doesn't exist.

I sugges that you pass *three* parameters into Student, a String for name, an int for year, and a String for major, and that you on the first line of this constructor explicitly call the super's constructor passing in the two required parameters.

Person class --> When we write a constructor explicitly(in this case name,year) we are telling the users that if they want to create a Person object then name and year is mandatory.
Now another class Student extends Person....here we are adding the attribute major. As Student inherits attributes from Person it makes sense to say that if anyone wants to create a Student object then name,year and major is mandatory.
So with view to inheritance, it does not makes sense to say that the base class Person should be constructed with name and year but the subclass Student should be constructed with major.