5 Inheritance versus composition

Refer to 0069 for a more in-depth discussion. Generally speaking. composition is a better approach because:

• It limits the interface to only the public members.
• The containing class may have any number of members of the component class.
• The containing class may have pointers to or reference of the component class.

However, inheritance is the only way to go if protected members of a superclass are needed, or when virtual methods of a superclass need to be overriden.

Conceptually, inheritance (the “is a” relationship) is different from composition (the “has a” relationship).