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In object-oriented programming, when a derived class inherits from a base class, an object of the derived class may be referred to via a pointer or reference of the base class type instead of the derived class type. If there are base class methods overridden by the derived class, the method actually called by such a reference or pointer can be ...
The class A serves as a base class for the derived class B, which in turn serves as a base class for the derived class C. The class B is known as intermediate base class because it provides a link for the inheritance between A and C. The chain ABC is known as inheritance path. A derived class with multilevel inheritance is declared as follows:
An autorelative pointer is a pointer whose value is interpreted as an offset from the address of the pointer itself; thus, if a data structure has an autorelative pointer member that points to some portion of the data structure itself, then the data structure may be relocated in memory without having to update the value of the auto relative ...
When using polymorphism, one sometimes needs to create copies of objects by the base class pointer. A commonly used idiom for this is adding a virtual clone function that is defined in every derived class. The CRTP can be used to avoid having to duplicate that function or other similar functions in every derived class.
Virtual inheritance is a C++ technique that ensures only one copy of a base class ' s member variables are inherited by grandchild derived classes. Without virtual inheritance, if two classes B and C inherit from a class A, and a class D inherits from both B and C, then D will contain two copies of A ' s member variables: one via B, and one via C.
Classes can be derived from one or more existing classes, thereby establishing a hierarchical relationship between the derived-from classes (base classes, parent classes or superclasses) and the derived class (child class or subclass) . The relationship of the derived class to the derived-from classes is commonly known as an is-a relationship. [21]
Although static_cast conversions are checked at compile time to prevent obvious incompatibilities, no run-time type checking is performed that would prevent a cast between incompatible data types, such as pointers. A static_cast from a pointer to a class B to a pointer to a derived class D is ill-formed if B is an inaccessible or ambiguous base ...
Classes may inherit from other classes, so they are arranged in a hierarchy that represents "is-a-type-of" relationships. For example, class Employee might inherit from class Person. All the data and methods available to the parent class also appear in the child class with the same names.