Abstract type

An abstract type is like a pretend type. It's like saying, "let's imagine there's a type of thing called a 'fruit'". We can talk about fruits and what they have in common, even though there isn't one specific thing that is a "fruit" - apples are fruits, bananas are fruits, and so on.

In programming, we use abstract types to talk about groups of things that have similar behavior, but might not have the exact same properties or methods. For example, we might say that there's an abstract type of object called a "vehicle". Some vehicles are cars, some are trucks, some are bikes, and so on. They might have different properties like number of wheels or engines, but they all share some behavior, like being able to move on their own.

Because abstract types don't have a specific implementation, they can be useful for creating more generic code that can work with many different types of objects. We might write a function that takes a "vehicle" as an argument, without needing to know exactly what kind of vehicle it is. This helps make our code more flexible and reusable.