Inheritance

What is Inheritance

• Provides a way to create a new class from an existing class.

• New class is a specialized version of the existing class.

• Allows the new class to overload methods from the existing class.

Terminology

• Base Class(or Parent): inherited by child class.
• Derived Class(or child): inherits from base class.

Characteristics

A derived class has:

• All members defined in the derived class.
• All ​members declared in the base class.

A derived class can:

• Use all public members defined in the derived class.
• Use all public members defined in the base class.
• Override an inherited member

A derived class cannot:

• Inherit constructors and destructors
• Change the definition of an inherited member

Notation

Let’s take a look at the notation for these two types.