Teach Yourself Borland C++ in 14 Days - portal

120 Day 4
You can see from Figure 4.1 that the class called F16 is descended from the class called
MilitaryFighter. Ultimately, F16 is derived from Airplane since Airplane is the base class for
all classes.
Multiple Inheritance
NEW TERM
NOTE
The act of deriving a class from two or more base classes is called multiple inheritance.
Multiple inheritance is not used frequently, but it can be very handy when needed. For
example, let’s say you had a class called Armaments that kept track of the armaments for a
particular aircraft. It might look like this:
class Armaments {
public:
Armaments();
LoadArms();
private:
bool isArmed;
int numSidewinders;
int numSparrows;
// etc.
};
Now let’s say that you were to create a class to represent a military fighter. You could inherit
from both MilitaryPlane and Armaments:
class Fighter : public MilitaryPlane, public Armaments {
public:
Fighter(char* name);
private:
// other stuff
};
Now you have a class that contains all the public elements of MilitaryPlane and all the public
elements of Armaments. This would allow you to do the following:
Fighter fighter(“F16”);
fighter.LoadArms();
fighter.SendMessage(...);
// etc.
The two base classes are blended to form a single class.
You should call the base class constructor for all base classes. The
following illustrates:
F16::F16(char* _name)
: MilitaryPlane(_name, F16), Armaments()
{