Question about Abstract Classes and Class Inheritance

Question

The semester is winding down, and the assignments are getting more complicated....
Prof has given us a project involving both an interface and an abstract class. There's a class Person, then an abstract class Employee that extends Person, and two types of Employees (Hourly and Salaried) that extend Employee. The finished assignment is a type of payroll program that's supposed to be able to store both types of Employees and related info (name, salary, etc). One thing the prof suggested was to store both HourlyEmployees and SalariedEmployees in an array of Employees. But you can't instantiate an array of Employees directly, of course, since it's an abstract class.
So is it possible to create an array of Persons, cast either HourlyEmployees or SalariedEmployees into Employee objects, and then store the Employee objects in the Person array? And if I do that, can I still use methods particular to the SalariedEmployees and/or HourlyEmployees once they are in the Person array? Or can I store SalariedEmployee and HourlyEmployee directly in an array of Persons, without having to cast them into anything else? (In that case, I'm not sure what the point of having the abstract Employee class is, though). Do they become just generic "Persons" if I do this?
Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

But you
can't instantiate an array of Employees directly, of
course, since it's an abstract class.Sure you can. You just can't instantiate Employee (the abstact class itself, as opposed to its subclasses) objects.
Employee[] employees = new Employee[20];
employees[0] = new HourlyEmployee();That should work.
So is it possible to create an array of Persons, cast
either HourlyEmployees or SalariedEmployees into
Employee objects, and then store the Employee objects
in the Person array?You could do that as well, but you shouldn't need to cast it.
Given the type hierarchy you describe, an HourlyEmployee is a Person, so you should be able to assign an HourlyEmployee directly to a Person-valued variable.
And if I do that, can I still use
methods particular to the SalariedEmployees and/or
HourlyEmployees once they are in the Person array?No. If the method doesn't exist in Person, then you can't call it on a Person variable, even if the method does exist in the class implementing Person.
But if the method exists in Person, but is implemented and possibly overridden in HourlyEmployee, you can still invoke it, by just invoking the Person method.
public interface Person {
  public void feed();
public abstract class Employee implements Person {
  public abstract void hire();
public class HourlyEmployee extends Employee {
// then:
Person persons = new Person[20];
// add HourlyEmployees or SalariedEmployees to persons array...
persons[0].feed(); // OK!
persons[0].hire(); // NOT OK!