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inheritance

Introduction to Inheritance in C++

Let me introduce you to the concept of Inheritance in C++. Reusability is yet another important feature of C++. It is always nice if we could reuse something that already exists rather than trying to create the same all over again. It would not only save the time and money but also reduce frustration and increase readability. For instance, the reuse of a class that has already been tested, debugged and used many time can save us the effort of developing and testing the same again. Fortunately, C++ strongly supports the concept of reusability.The C++ classes can be reused in several ways. Once a class has been written and tested, it can be adapted by other programmers to suit their requirements. This is basically done by creating new classes which reuse the properties of the existing ones. The mechanism of deriving a new class from an old one is called...

Protected Inheritance in C++

Understanding the concept of Protected Inheritance in C++. A special mention of visibility label protected: We have just seen how to increase the capabilities of an existing class without modifying it. We have also seen that a private member of a base class cannot be inherited and therefore its is not available for the derived class directly. What do we do if the private data needs to be inherited by a derived class? This can be accomplished by modifying the visibility limit of the private member by making it public. But, this would make it accessible to all the other functions of the program, thus, eliminating the advantage of data hiding. C++ provides a third visibility modifier, protected which serves a limited purpose in inheritance. A member declared as protected is accessible by the member functions within its class and any class immediately derived from it. It cannot be accessed...