Behavioral subtyping
In object-oriented programming, behavioral subtyping is the principle that subclasses should satisfy the expectations of clients accessing subclass objects through references of superclass type, not just as regards syntactic safety (such as the absence of "method-not-found" errors) but also as regards behavioral correctness. Specifically, properties that clients can prove using the specification of an object's presumed type should hold even though the object is actually a member of a subtype of that type.