Inheritance in C++
Inheritance and composition are two fundamental OOP concepts that enable the creation of complex and reusable software designs in C++. They facilitate code reuse and help in modeling real-world relationships, though they operate differently.
Inheritance allows one class, known as the derived or subclass, to inherit properties and behaviors from another class, the base or superclass. This enables the derived class to reuse the code in the base class while extending or overriding its functionality. For instance, consider a BaseSocket
class and its derived classes, TcpSocket
and UdpSocket
. The derived classes inherit the basic functionality of BaseSocket
and add their specific implementations:
class BaseSocket { public: virtual ssize_t send(const std::vector<uint8_t>& data) = 0; virtual ~BaseSocket() = default; }; class TcpSocket : public BaseSocket { public: ssize_t send(const std...