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Showing content from http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/oldtutorial/inheritance/ below:

In principle, private and protected members of a class cannot be accessed from outside the same class in which they are declared. However, this rule does not affect

.

Friends are functions or classes declared with the friend keyword.

If we want to declare an external function as friend of a class, thus allowing this function to have access to the private and protected members of this class, we do it by declaring a prototype of this external function within the class, and preceding it with the keyword friend:

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// friend functions
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

class CRectangle {
    int width, height;
  public:
    void set_values (int, int);
    int area () {return (width * height);}
    friend CRectangle duplicate (CRectangle);
};

void CRectangle::set_values (int a, int b) {
  width = a;
  height = b;
}

CRectangle duplicate (CRectangle rectparam)
{
  CRectangle rectres;
  rectres.width = rectparam.width*2;
  rectres.height = rectparam.height*2;
  return (rectres);
}

int main () {
  CRectangle rect, rectb;
  rect.set_values (2,3);
  rectb = duplicate (rect);
  cout << rectb.area();
  return 0;
}

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The

function is a friend of

. From within that function we have been able to access the members

and

of different objects of type

, which are private members. Notice that neither in the declaration of

nor in its later use in

have we considered

a member of class

. It isn't! It simply has access to its private and protected members without being a member.

The friend functions can serve, for example, to conduct operations between two different classes. Generally, the use of friend functions is out of an object-oriented programming methodology, so whenever possible it is better to use members of the same class to perform operations with them. Such as in the previous example, it would have been shorter to integrate duplicate() within the class CRectangle.

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// friend class
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

class CSquare;

class CRectangle {
    int width, height;
  public:
    int area ()
      {return (width * height);}
    void convert (CSquare a);
};

class CSquare {
  private:
    int side;
  public:
    void set_side (int a)
      {side=a;}
    friend class CRectangle;
};

void CRectangle::convert (CSquare a) {
  width = a.side;
  height = a.side;
}
  
int main () {
  CSquare sqr;
  CRectangle rect;
  sqr.set_side(4);
  rect.convert(sqr);
  cout << rect.area();
  return 0;
}

16

In this example, we have declared

as a friend of

so that

member functions could have access to the protected and private members of

, more concretely to

, which describes the side width of the square.

You may also see something new at the beginning of the program: an empty declaration of class CSquare. This is necessary because within the declaration of CRectangle we refer to CSquare (as a parameter in convert()). The definition of CSquare is included later, so if we did not include a previous empty declaration for CSquare this class would not be visible from within the definition of CRectangle.

Consider that friendships are not corresponded if we do not explicitly specify so. In our example, CRectangle is considered as a friend class by CSquare, but CRectangle does not consider CSquare to be a friend, so CRectangle can access the protected and private members of CSquare but not the reverse way. Of course, we could have declared also CSquare as friend of CRectangle if we wanted to.

Another property of friendships is that they are not transitive: The friend of a friend is not considered to be a friend unless explicitly specified.

This could be represented in the world of classes with a class CPolygon from which we would derive the two other ones: CRectangle and CTriangle.

The class

would contain members that are common for both types of polygon. In our case:

and

. And

and

would be its derived classes, with specific features that are different from one type of polygon to the other.

Classes that are derived from others inherit all the accessible members of the base class. That means that if a base class includes a member A and we derive it to another class with another member called B, the derived class will contain both members A and B.

In order to derive a class from another, we use a colon (:) in the declaration of the derived class using the following format:

class derived_class_name: public base_class_name
{ /*...*/ };

Where

is the name of the derived class and

is the name of the class on which it is based. The

access specifier may be replaced by any one of the other access specifiers

and

. This access specifier limits the most accessible level for the members inherited from the base class: The members with a more accessible level are inherited with this level instead, while the members with an equal or more restrictive access level keep their restrictive level in the derived class.

// derived classes
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

class CPolygon {
  protected:
    int width, height;
  public:
    void set_values (int a, int b)
      { width=a; height=b;}
  };

class CRectangle: public CPolygon {
  public:
    int area ()
      { return (width * height); }
  };

class CTriangle: public CPolygon {
  public:
    int area ()
      { return (width * height / 2); }
  };
  
int main () {
  CRectangle rect;
  CTriangle trgl;
  rect.set_values (4,5);
  trgl.set_values (4,5);
  cout << rect.area() << endl;
  cout << trgl.area() << endl;
  return 0;
}

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The objects of the classes

and

each contain members inherited from

. These are:

,

and

.

The protected access specifier is similar to private. Its only difference occurs in fact with inheritance. When a class inherits from another one, the members of the derived class can access the protected members inherited from the base class, but not its private members.

Since we wanted width and height to be accessible from members of the derived classes CRectangle and CTriangle and not only by members of CPolygon, we have used protected access instead of private.

We can summarize the different access types according to who can access them in the following way:

Where "not members" represent any access from outside the class, such as from

, from another class or from a function.

In our example, the members inherited by CRectangle and CTriangle have the same access permissions as they had in their base class CPolygon:

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CPolygon::width           // protected access
CRectangle::width         // protected access

CPolygon::set_values()    // public access
CRectangle::set_values()  // public access 

This is because we have used the

keyword to define the inheritance relationship on each of the derived classes:

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class CRectangle: public CPolygon { ... }

This

keyword after the colon (

) denotes the most accessible level the members inherited from the class that follows it (in this case

) will have. Since

is the most accessible level, by specifying this keyword the derived class will inherit all the members with the same levels they had in the base class.

If we specify a more restrictive access level like protected, all public members of the base class are inherited as protected in the derived class. Whereas if we specify the most restricting of all access levels: private, all the base class members are inherited as private.

For example, if daughter was a class derived from mother that we defined as:

1

class daughter: protected mother;

This would set

as the maximum access level for the members of

that it inherited from

. That is, all members that were public in

would become protected in

. Of course, this would not restrict

to declare its own public members. That maximum access level is only set for the members inherited from

.

If we do not explicitly specify any access level for the inheritance, the compiler assumes private for classes declared with class keyword and public for those declared with struct.

• its constructor and its destructor
• its operator=() members
• its friends

Although the constructors and destructors of the base class are not inherited themselves, its default constructor (i.e., its constructor with no parameters) and its destructor are always called when a new object of a derived class is created or destroyed.

If the base class has no default constructor or you want that an overloaded constructor is called when a new derived object is created, you can specify it in each constructor definition of the derived class:

derived_constructor_name (parameters) : base_constructor_name (parameters) {...}

For example:

// constructors and derived classes
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

class mother {
  public:
    mother ()
      { cout << "mother: no parameters\n"; }
    mother (int a)
      { cout << "mother: int parameter\n"; }
};

class daughter : public mother {
  public:
    daughter (int a)
      { cout << "daughter: int parameter\n\n"; }
};

class son : public mother {
  public:
    son (int a) : mother (a)
      { cout << "son: int parameter\n\n"; }
};

int main () {
  daughter cynthia (0);
  son daniel(0);
  
  return 0;
}

mother: no parameters
daughter: int parameter
 
mother: int parameter
son: int parameter

Notice the difference between which

's constructor is called when a new

object is created and which when it is a

object. The difference is because the constructor declaration of

and

:

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daughter (int a)          // nothing specified: call default
son (int a) : mother (a)  // constructor specified: call this 

In C++ it is perfectly possible that a class inherits members from more than one class. This is done by simply separating the different base classes with commas in the derived class declaration. For example, if we had a specific class to print on screen (

) and we wanted our classes

and

to also inherit its members in addition to those of

we could write:

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class CRectangle: public CPolygon, public COutput;
class CTriangle: public CPolygon, public COutput;

here is the complete example:

// multiple inheritance
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

class CPolygon {
  protected:
    int width, height;
  public:
    void set_values (int a, int b)
      { width=a; height=b;}
  };

class COutput {
  public:
    void output (int i);
  };

void COutput::output (int i) {
  cout << i << endl;
  }

class CRectangle: public CPolygon, public COutput {
  public:
    int area ()
      { return (width * height); }
  };

class CTriangle: public CPolygon, public COutput {
  public:
    int area ()
      { return (width * height / 2); }
  };
  
int main () {
  CRectangle rect;
  CTriangle trgl;
  rect.set_values (4,5);
  trgl.set_values (4,5);
  rect.output (rect.area());
  trgl.output (trgl.area());
  return 0;
}

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