Is it legal to initilize base class members in a derived class initilizer list?

The title says it all. I have class surface_base with a single member: m_data, a pointer to raw surface data. class surface (derived from surface_base) adds some extra constructors which try to initilize m_data in the initilizer list...

The error I get is "surface.hpp(39) : error C2614: 'surface' : illegal member initialization: 'm_data' is not a base or member" in MSVC++ 6.

Either it's illegal to do this, or I have a syntax error somewhere else and the compiler is giving me misleading error messages.

it's illegal -- you have to use one of the base class's constructors. You call the appropriate constructor in the initializer list just like you'd initialize a variable in a class IE

Code:

---

class A
{
public:
    A() {}
    A( int Init ) : Var( Init ) {}
protected:
    int Var;
};

class B
    : public A
{
public:
    B() {}
    B( int A_Init, int B_Init ) : A( A_Init ), Var2( B_Init ) {}
protected:
    int Var2;
};

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