When I started this series, I talked about the four pillars of object-oriented programming. Each of these topics is listed and linked below.

  1. Abstraction
  2. Encapsulation
  3. Inheritance
  4. Polymorphism

At this point, I’d normally want to begin moving on to the next topic. Before doing so, though, I’d like to spend one more post exploring the concept of polymorphism.

In my career, thus far, I’ve seen few topics give those getting into object-oriented programming more confusion and problems than polymorphism. So I’d like to discuss it a little more in-depth within the context of object-oriented programming and outside any particular framework or application (like WordPress).

In this post, I’ll do a quick review of what we’ve discussed thus far, then hop back into polymorphism.

Polymorphism In-Depth

First, as mentioned, I want to quickly review what’s been discussed so far especially if you’ve glossed over any of the previous posts.

Don’t worry: Nothing below digresses into code. Instead, it simply defines the terms we’ve used so you have some idea as to what I’m referring to whenever you see the word crop up throughout this series.