Interface inheritance

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In object-oriented programming, interface inheritance is type of inheritance wherein one or more classes share a set of messages. This sharing can be realized by agreement, as in Python, or by use of programming-language-specific machinery, as in Java.

Interface inheritance is considered the most important aspect of inheritance^{[citation needed]}. It is often conflated with the notion of implementation inheritance in the object-oriented programming paradigm. There is, however, a subtle, but notable difference: the latter is less flexible than the former, as it is unamiable to encapsulation^{[citation needed]}.

In Java, this is the mechanism used when multiple inheritance is desired. Since Java does not support multiple inheritance, the implementation of multiple interfaces allows it to satisfy the "is-a" relationship for multiple "super"classes.