Q:

Q: You said that the JVM starts walking up the inheritance tree, starting at the class type you invoked the method on (like the Wolf example on the previous page). But what happens if the JVM doesn’t ever find a match?

A:

A: Good question! But you don’t have to worry about that. The compiler guarantees that a particular method is callable for a specific reference type, but it doesn’t say (or care) from which class that method actually comes from at runtime. With the Wolf example, the compiler checks for a sleep() method, but doesn’t care that sleep() is actually defined in (and inherited from) class Animal. Remember that if a class inherits a method, it has the method.