Another Object Lesson: Objects, Inheritance, and References

The ostream and ofstream classes bring an interesting property of references to the fore. As you may recall from Chapter 6, “Branching Statements and Logical Operators,” objects of the ofstream type can use ostream methods, allowing file input/output to use the same forms as console input/output. The language feature that makes it possible to pass features from one class to another is called inheritance, and Chapter 13, “Class Inheritance,” discusses this feature in detail. In brief, ostream is termed a base class (because the ofstream class is based on it) and ofstream is termed a derived class (because it is derived from ostream). A derived class inherits the base class methods, which ...

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