PHP OOP - Polymorphism - Introduction

Introduction

Polymorphism - Greek for "many shapes", is one of the four pillars of Object Oriented Programming. The other three are Abstraction, Encapsulation, and Inheritance.

In Object Oriented Programming, Polymorphism allows objects of different classes to be treated as if they were objects of the same class. This concept helps developers write code that is more generic, more flexible, and easier to reuse.

Polymorphism in PHP

Several forms of polymorphism (pun intended) exist across different programming languages. In PHP, you can implement polymorphism using:

• inheritance (subclasses / subtypes)
• abstract classes
• interfaces

In the next units we will cover each of these.