It's a concept of deriving all the functionality of a class/structure into other class/structure (generally both are user defined). Inheritance will omit the the requirement of declaring a base object inside a derived object.
struct base{ // members of base };
Now, if you are using C then we can have the derived structure functionality implemented as below:
struct derived{ base obj; // members of derived };
but in C++ it is like following:
struct derived : <inheritance type> base{ // members of derived }; where inheritance type = public, protected, private
Inheritance is the capability of one class(derived class) to inherit properties i.e data members & functions of the base class.It supports reusability of code & is able to simulate the transitive nature of real life objects..It has many forms':Single inheritance, multiple inheritance, hierarchial & multilevel inheritance
using inheritance we can derive some codes from one class to another if it is not private. inheritance is used to establish a relation between one class and another class(it can be done with two non related classes also but we should not do that it would be a bad programming). with the help of inheritance we can avoid typing some codes repeatedly.
for example class base { public void display() //if display() is private we will get an error { cout<<"inherited"; } }; class der : public base { }; void main() { der o=new der(); o.display(); //though display() is not in der we had inherited it from base so } //it would print inherted
The main use of inheritance is to provide reusability of codes .Through inheritance base class objects and functions are acquired by derived class so there is no need to specify it again in derived class
