Question

I ran into an error yesterday and, while it’s easy to get around, I wanted to make sure that I’m understanding C++ right.

I have a base class with a protected member:

class Base
{
  protected:
    int b;
  public:
    void DoSomething(const Base& that)
    {
      b+=that.b;
    }
};

This compiles and works just fine. Now I extend Base but still want to use b:

class Derived : public Base
{
  protected:
    int d;
  public:
    void DoSomething(const Base& that)
    {
      b+=that.b;
      d=0;
    }
};

Note that in this case DoSomething is still taking a reference to a Base, not Derived. I would expect that I can still have access to that.b inside of Derived, but I get a cannot access protected member error (MSVC 8.0 – haven’t tried gcc yet).

Obviously, adding a public getter on b solved the problem, but I was wondering why I couldn’t have access directly to b. I though that when you use public inheritance the protected variables are still visible to the derived class.

Answer 1

A class can only access protected members of instances of this class or a derived class. It cannot access protected members of instances of a parent class or cousin class.

In your case, the Derived class can only access the b protected member of Derived instances, not that of Base instances.

Changing the constructor to take a Derived instance will solve the problem.