Programming to an Interface, not an Implementation

Class inheritance is basically just a mechanism for extending an application's functionality by reusing
functionality in parent classes. It lets you define a new kind of object rapidly in terms of an old one. It lets
you get new implementations almost for free, inheriting most of what you need from existing classes.
However, implementation reuse is only half the story. Inheritance's ability to define families of objects with
identical interfaces (usually by inheriting from an abstract class) is also important. Why? Because
polymorphism depends on it.
When inheritance is used carefully (some will say properly), all classes derived from an abstract class will
share its interface. This implies that a subclass merely adds or overrides operations and does not hide
operations of the parent class. All subclasses can then respond to the requests in the interface of this abstract
class, making them all subtypes of the abstract class.
There are two benefits to manipulating objects solely in terms of the interface defined by abstract classes:
1. Clients remain unaware of the specific types of objects they use, as long as the objects adhere to the
interface that clients expect.
2. Clients remain unaware of the classes that implement these objects. Clients only know about the
abstract class(es) defining the interface.
This so greatly reduces implementation dependencies between subsystems that it leads to the following
principle of reusable object-oriented design: