Sams Teach Yourself C++ in One Hour a Day, Seventh Edition

Lesson 11. Polymorphism

Having learned the basics of inheritance, creating an inheritance hierarchy, and understanding that public inheritance essentially models an is-a relationship, it’s time to move on to consuming this knowledge in learning the holy grail of object-oriented programming: polymorphism.

In this lesson, you find out

• What polymorphism actually means

• What virtual functions do and how to use them

• What abstract base classes are and how to declare them

• What virtual inheritance means and where you need it

Basics of Polymorphism

“Poly” is Greek for many, and “morph” means form. Polymorphism is that feature of object-oriented languages that allows objects of different types to be treated similarly. This lesson focuses on polymorphic ...