A problem in inheritance in C++

I have a little stupid question, hope some will help

okay, let's say like this. I have a template class, eg. class Human, therefore it can not be modified.

Ok, now I write a class, eg. class Female, inherit from class Human.

Now the problem is, if i have a function return a Human value, and I want to assign the value to Female, this is typically impossible.

For example, like this

Code:

---

class Human
{
        public Human getHuman()
      {
                return aDummyHuman;
        }
}

class Female : Human{

        private Item handBag;         

}

---

And if I have a code like this

Code:

---

objFemale1 = functionReturnHumanValue("Blah Blah Blah");

---

Probably I will get an error like
error C2440: '=' : cannot convert from 'Human' to 'Female'

So what should I do in this stage, to get objFemale1 get all the value of Human properties, plus for handBag, eg. = NULL?

Thanks in advance

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TnTonly

Ok, now I write a class, eg. class Female, inherit from class Human.

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Note that you are using private inheritance. You probably want to use public inheritance here, and also provide Human with a virtual destructor.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TnTonly

Now the problem is, if i have a function return a Human value, and I want to assign the value to Female, this is typically impossible.

---

It looks like Human should be an abstract base class, so you would not be returning a Human object anyway.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TnTonly

So what should I do in this stage, to get objFemale1 get all the value of Human properties, plus for handBag, eg. = NULL?

---

What does it mean to convert a generic human to a female? It sounds like you have something fundamentally wrong with your class design.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TnTonly

I have a template class, eg. class Human, therefore it can not be modified.

---

The Human class you posted is not a template, it's just a regular class.
Also, why can't it be modified?

Polymorphism works the other way around - derived classes are also base classes. Also note that you still can't assign a Female to a Human. When using polymorphism, you must work with either pointers or references. It's fine to assign a Female* to a Human*.