Inheritance

Inheritance is a mechanism of reusing and extending existing classes without modifying them, thus producing hierarchical relationships between them.

Multiple inheritance allows you to create a derived class that inherits properties from more than one base class. Because a derived class inherits members from all its base classes, ambiguities can result. For example, if two base classes have a member with the same name, the derived class cannot implicitly differentiate between the two members. Note that, when you are using multiple inheritance, the access to names of base classes may be ambiguous.

A direct base class is a base class that appears directly as a base specifier in the declaration of its derived class.

An indirect base class is a base class that does not appear directly in the declaration of the derived class but is available to the derived class through one of its base classes. For a given class, all base classes that are not direct base classes are indirect base classes.