In the past articles we saw how we can make a class inherit from another class. This way we could have a new class with features of the base class without explicitly defining them. But what if, we want to have a new class with features form more than one class. In other words, Is it possible for a derived class to inherit multiple base classes (two or more).
Yes it’s possible!
The general from for deriving a class from multiple classes is:
class derived-class:access-specifier base1,access-specifier base2...
{
...
...
...
};
The following example program illustrates multiple inheritance practically:
// -- INHERITANCE --
// Program to illustrate multiple
// inheritance
#include<iostream.h>
// base class (1)
class base1
{
protected:
int a;
public:
void showa(){cout<<a<<"\n";}
};
// base class (2)
class base2
{
protected:
int b;
public:
void showb(){cout<<b<<"\n";}
};
// derived class
// inherits both base1 and base2
// NOTE: Both the base class have
// access-specifier
class derived:public base1,public base2
{
protected:
int c;
public:
void set(int n1,int n2,int n3)
{
a=n1;b=n2;c=n3;
}
void show()
{
cout<<a<<"\n"<<b<<"\n"<<c<<"\n";
}
};
void main(void)
{
derived d;
d.set(10,20,30);
// access base's members
d.showa();
d.showb();
// access derived's member
d.show();
}
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