How does instance variable invocation work when you do A thing = new B(); where B is a subclass of A?

Question

This is probably answered somewhere, but I have no idea what to search for. Imagine you have the following...

The superclass, Animal.java

public class An         


        

Answer 1

Longer answer:

So really the way you'd do this is define Lion thus:

public class Lion extends Animal {
  public Lion() {
     noise = "ROAR!!";
  }
}

So now for Lion instances the noise member variable of Animal has been updated to ROAR!!

Of course you'd (almost) never actually have a public mutable member on a class like that in the wild.