Sams Teach Yourself C in 21 Days

In programming terms, it is said that an employee inherits the characteristics of a person.

Additionally, a student inherits the characteristics of a person. Figure B3.1 illustrates the

relationship between these three potential classes.

If you create classes to store a persons, employees, and students, you can make a couple

of additional statements. You can say that

• Person is a base class.


• Employee and student are subclasses.


• There is no relationship between employee and student, although they use—
  descend from—the same base class.

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Abase classis simply a class that is inherited from by another class.

Note

Asubclassis simply a class that inheritsfrom another class.

Note

Building a Base Class for Inheritance ..........................................................

The best way to understand the power of inheritance is to see it in action. Before you can

inherit, you need a base class from which to inherit. You can build a base class just as

you built classes earlier today. The base class for today’s example is the person class.

Listing B3.7 presents a base class, as well as some code to see it in use.

LISTINGB3.7 base.cpp. The person class set up to be used as a base class

1: #include <iostream.h>

2: #include <string.h>

3:

4: #define MAX_LEN 81

5:

6: class person {

FIGUREB3.1

The relationship

between the person,

student, and employee

classes.

person

employee student

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