Question

I saw the following code some time ago and nobody could answer me what was, neither knew about it.
I am using Visual Studio 2010, as C++, in a file saved as cpp (at a project of win32 cmd program), then i declare the following:

class People {
private:
    string name;
    short age;
public:
    People (string name,short age) 
        : name(name),
          age(age) 
    {
        //
    }
    inline string getName(void) {return name;}
};

class Professor : public People {
private:
    int salary;
    int nAlunos;
public:
    Professor(string name, short age, int salary, int nAlunos) 
        : People(name,age),
          salary(salary),
          nAlunos(nAlunos) 
    {
       //
    }
};

Why does this assignment of the values work?

Notice that I don’t write explicitly: name = newName, the stuff works on its own.

I also tried at wxDev-CPP and worked.

Answer 1

You mean the initialization lists? That’s where you can initialize parent classes and member variables as part of your constructor.

http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial/initialization-lists-c++.html