Better to extend a class or modify it directly?

Posted by primehunter326 on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by primehunter326
Published on 2010-04-28T16:21:10Z Indexed on 2010/04/28 16:23 UTC
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best-practices

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extend

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Hi,

So I'm working on creating a visualization for a data structure in Java. I already have the implementation of the data structure (Binary Search Tree) to start with, but I need to add some additional functionality to the included node class. As far as conventions and best practices are concerned, should I create a subclass of the node with this added functionality or should I just modify what I have and document it there?

My question is similar to what's asked here but that's a little over my head.

I know it probably doesn't matter much for what I'm doing, so I'm asking this more as a general thing.

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