Overriding and Super Functions

Inheritance is great for adding new behavior to existing classes, but what about changing behavior? Our Contact class allows only a name and an email address. This may be sufficient for most contacts, but what if we want to add a phone number for our close friends?

Overriding method

We can do this easily by setting a phone attribute on the contact after it is constructed. But if we want to make this third variable available on initialization, we have to override the __init__() method. Overriding means altering or replacing a method of the superclass with a new method (with the same name) in the subclass. No special syntax is needed to do this; the subclass’s newly created method is automatically called instead of the superclass’s method, as shown in the following code: