C++ By Example: UnderC Learning Edition

The Idea of Inheritance

Different things often have something in common. Buses and cars are all four-wheeled vehicles, a goat and a sheep are both plant-eating domesticated animals, and so on. In object-oriented programming things are modeled using classes; inheritance is a powerful way to express the common properties of classes.

Inheritance, as you will see, will also save you a lot of typing. A class can inherit all the properties of another class, plus some extra functionality. So it is useful for customizing existing classes.

Extending a struct

Say you want to define an Employee class. In Chapter 7 you created quite a lot of code that uses the Person class, and so it seems reasonable just to copy the fields of Person and add some extra fields ...