Inheritance: Restrictions

The following are never inherited:

• Constructors.

• Destructors.

• friend functions.

• Overloaded new operators.

• Overloaded = operators.

Class friendship is not inherited.

What happens if we modify the Customer outputBalanceDue() as follows ...

void Customer::outputBalanceDue() const
{
cout << "ID :" << idNum << ", balance due $" << balanceDue << endl;
}

... so we directly output idNum, a base class data member? The private members of the base class cannot be directly accessed by the member functions of the derived class.

A couple of solutions...

We could define a public Person function:

int getID() const { return idNum; }

Or we can change the access specifier on the data members in the base class ...

class Person {
protected:
int idNum;
string firstName;
string lastName;
public:
void setFields(int, string, string);
void outputData();

};