C++ Primer Plus

The Student Class Design

At this point, the design plan for the Student class is to use a string object to represent the name and a valarray<double> object to represent the quiz scores. How should this be done? You might be tempted to publicly derive a Student class from these two classes. That would be an example of multiple public inheritance, which C++ allows, but it would be inappropriate here. The reason is that the relationship of a student to these classes doesn’t fit the is-a model. A student is not a name. A student is not an array of quiz scores. What you have here is a has-a relationship. A student has a name, and a student has an array of quiz scores. The usual C++ technique for modeling has-a relationships is to use composition or ...