Navigating C++ and Object-Oriented Design

11.15. Key Point Summary

• Inheritance is a powerful language feature and a primary characteristic of an object-oriented language.

• When you design object-oriented applications, the first step is to abstract a system. This means you look for the similarities, not the differences, among system components.

• C++ implements inheritance with public derivation, private derivation, and protected derivation. Each derivation has its own access rules between base and derived classes.

• When building objects in class hierarchies, the compiler calls base class constructors before derived class constructors. To release objects, the compiler calls base class destructors after derived class destructors. The compiler passes arguments to base class constructors with member ...