C++ Tutorial – 17 – Inheritance

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Inheritance allows a class to acquire the members of another class. In the example below, Square inherits from Rectangle. This is specified after the class name by using a colon followed by the public keyword, and the name of the class to inherit from. Rectangle then becomes a base class of Square, which in turn becomes a derived class of Rectangle. In addition to its own members, Square gains all accessible members in Rectangle, except for its constructors and destructor.

class Rectangle
{
 public:
  int x, y;
  int getArea() { return x * y; }
};
 
class Square : public Rectangle {};

Upcasting

An object can be upcast to its base class, because it contains everything that the base class contains. An upcast is performed by assigning the object to either a reference or a pointer of its base class type. In the example below, a Square object is upcast to Rectangle. When using Rectangle‘s interface the Square object will be viewed as a Rectangle, so only Rectangle‘s members can be accessed.

Square s; 
Rectangle& r = s;  // reference upcast
Rectangle* p = &s; // pointer upcast

A derived class can be used anywhere a base class is expected. For example, a Square object can be passed as an argument to a function that expects a Rectangle object. The derived object will then implicitly be upcast to its base type.

void setXY(Rectangle& r) { r.x = 2; r.y = 3; }
 
int main() 
{
  Square s; 
  setXY(s);
}

Downcasting

A Rectangle reference that points to a Square object can be downcast back to a Square object. This downcast has to be made explicit since downcasting an actual Rectangle to a Square is not allowed.

Square& a = (Square&) r;  // reference downcast
Square& b = (Square&) *p; // pointer downcast

Multiple inheritance

C++ allows a derived class to inherit from more than one base class. This is called multiple inheritance. The base classes are specified in a comma-separated list.

class Person {}
class Employee {}
 
class Teacher: public Person, public Employee {}

Multiple inheritance is not commonly used since most real-world relationships can be better described by single inheritance. It also tends to significantly increase the complexity of the code.

Recommended reading:
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