Inheritance and Access

reading

With inheritance, we create a base class that has member functions that should be generally applicable to any class that we build off of the base. We then create a sub class that inherits the functionality of the base class and can extend it.

Tip

Sometimes inheritance is described as being applicable when there is an is-a relationship.

E.g.:

  • A dog is an animal

  • A square is a shape

Access

There are different modes of access that come into play. First within the base class, we expand private and public to include protected:

  • private : member data and functions is only available to the base class.

  • protected : member data and functions is available to the base class as well as any class that inherits from it.

  • public: anyone can access the member data and functions.

If we expect to derive from our class and still want to practice encapsulation, then we would generally make the member data protected.

The second way access comes into play is when we define the class that inherits from the base. Shortly we’ll look at an example that defines a base class called Quadrilateral and then a class Rectangle that inherits from it. We will define the class as:

class Rectangle : public Quadrilateral

The : says that Rectangle inherits from Quadrilateral and the public keyword here means that the member data and functions are inherited with the same access restrictions as in the base class. We could alternately use protected or private here to change the access to the inherited data.

Constructor

How do we write the constructor of the sub class?

For our Rectangle example, we might think that we could just use a member initialization list to initialize the data, but this does not work.

Note

C++ prevents us from initializing inherited member variables in the member initialization list of the sub-class constructor.

Instead we can explicitly call the constructor of the base class to initialize any data in the base class and then use a member initialization list to initialize anything specific to the sub class.

Now, when we create a Rectangle, the constructor of the base class is first executed and then the remainder of the sub class constructor is executed.

Tip

A nice description of how the constructor of the sub class works is given in the Learn C++ tutorials.

Example

Here’s an example of the base Quadrilateral class and the Rectangle class that inherits from it.

Listing 87 shapes.H
#ifndef SHAPES_H
#define SHAPES_H

#include <vector>
#include <numeric>

class Quadrilateral {

protected:

    // store the side data
    // order: top, bottom, left, right

    std::vector<double> sides;

public:

    Quadrilateral()
        : sides{1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0} {}

    Quadrilateral(double s1, double s2, double s3, double s4)
        : sides{s1, s2, s3, s4} {}

    double perimeter() {
        return std::accumulate(sides.cbegin(), sides.cend(), 0.0);
    }
};


class Rectangle : public Quadrilateral {

public:

    Rectangle(double width, double height)
        : Quadrilateral(width, width, height, height) {}

    double area() {
        return sides[0] * sides[2];
    }
};

#endif

A few notes:

  • The Rectangle constructor takes only 2 arguments, since opposite sides of a rectangle are the same length. We then call the base class constructor to store these in the vector sides, duplicating the information as needed to initialize all 4 sides.

  • There is no additional member data in Rectangle, so no further initialization is needed.

  • The perimeter function is general to any quadrilateral, so Rectangle does not need to define it.

Here’s a test driver:

Listing 88 test_shapes.cpp
#include <iostream>

#include "shapes.H"

int main() {

    Quadrilateral q(1.0, 2.0, 1.0, 2.0);

    std::cout << "perimeter of q = " << q.perimeter() << std::endl;

    Rectangle r(2.0, 4.0);

    std::cout << "perimenter of r = " << r.perimeter() << std::endl;
    std::cout << "area of r = " << r.area() << std::endl;
}