Inheritance in C++—Classes

Abstract

As already explained in Chapter 9, object-oriented programming is mainly characterized by the features encapsulation, dynamic binding, and inheritance. The introduced classes in Chapter 11 show implementations of ADT’s (section 9.3). They serve for the realization of encapsulation. In this chapter we give a detailed description of the fundamental and powerful principles of inheritance and their implementation in C++. We introduce the concepts for both simple inheritance and — its more complicated form — multiple inheritance. With the use of inheritance, the real world dependency structure of objects can be mapped into a C++ class hierarchy in a “natural manner”.