Editor's Note: This article has been updated since its original publication. It's been 20 years or more since I wrote my first few hundred lines of code in C, so it's about time I learned a more ...
The idea is that inheritance is a way to express an "is a" relationship; in the above, Circle is an Ellipse, which is a Shape, thus, transitively, Circle is also a Shape. Implicitly, Shape is an ...