Thread: Inheritance constructor help?

Here is the question:

The Person class has two attributes, name and age. We want to create a subclass of Person, called Oldie, that represents someone who is getting on in age, say about thirty years old or older. Note the additional boolean-valued attribute called perryComoFan in Oldie. If you are an Oldie, you are either a fan of Perry Como or you are not.


For this exercise, write a complete constructor for the Oldie class. Your constructor should have three parameters: a String parameter called n, an int parameter called a, and a boolean parameter called p. Your code should initialize the name and age attributes to the value of n and a respectively. Your constructor must also assign the value of p to the perryComoFan attribute of the class.

Here is my code that I tried but it says it's wrong! I even tried used super(n, a); instead of the this. statements:

public class Oldie extends Person
 {
 private boolean perryComoFan;
 
Public Oldie(String n, int a, boolean p) {
 this.name=n;
 this.age=a;
 perryComoFan=p;
 }
}

Here is the error message:

compilation error (line 2, column 42) cannot find symbol
symbol : constructor Person()
compilation error (line 3, column 7) name has private access in inheritanceI.Person
compilation error (line 4, column 7) age has private access in inheritanceI.Person

(line 1 refers to the blank line above Public Oldie(String n....
line 2 refers to the line: Public Oldie(String n, int a...
line 3 refers to this.name=n; and so on)

Here is the Person class:

 
 public class Person
 {
  private String name;
  private int age;
 
  public Person(String n, int a)
  {
    this.name = n;
    this.age = a;
  }
 
  public String getName()
  {
    return name;
  }
 
  public int getAge()
  {
    return age;
  }
 
  public void setName(String n)
  {
    name = n;
  }
 
 public void setAge(int a)
 {
   age = a;
 }
 
  public void print( )
  {
    System.out.println("Name: " + name);
    System.out.println("Age: " + age);
  }
}

So I changed the code to :

public Person(String n, int a, boolean p) {
 this.name=n;
 this.age=a;
 perryComoFan=p;
 }

and it's saying:
compilation error (line 2, column 8) invalid method declaration, return type required. Why is it saying this?

That was my fault, I typed it here with a capital P but in my code it is lowercase.

The compiler we use for our class is called OWL, it is a part of our online textbook created by UMass Amherst I believe. If I enter the correct code, it marks my question correct and I can move on. The error messages I have been posting are all the information that is given to me, so the compiler is pretty useless.

Well I figured it out. I had to call super to get the name and age from the super class. Then since boolean perryComoFan is private, I couldn't refer to it directly.

Public Oldie(String n, int a, boolean p) {
 super(n, a);
 this.perryComoFan=p;
 }