C++ Primer, Fifth Edition

Chapter Summary

Inheritance lets us write new classes that share behavior with their base class(es) but override or add to that behavior as needed. Dynamic binding lets us ignore type differences by choosing, at run time, which version of a function to run based on an object’s dynamic type. The combination of inheritance and dynamic binding lets us write type-independent, programs that have type-specific behavior.

In C++, dynamic binding applies only to functions declared as virtual and called through a reference or pointer.

A derived-class object contains a subobject corresponding to each of its base classes. Because every derived object contains a base part, we can convert a reference or pointer to a derived-class type to a reference or pointer ...