Class inheritance guidance

[Jimbot]

Hello,

I have been working on a blackjack game and have tried to make use of the inheritance feature of classes in my design, but I am not sure whether I have implemented them correctly....

I have a player class and a dealer class which is derived from the player class (ie for functions such as Status and CheckHand)

This runs fine but as it stands there is nothing to stop a dealer object calling a function from the player class which it has inherited but which is only intended for a player object (ie it accesses a private member of the player class)

eg.

Player class:

class Player
{
	public:
		Player(string PlayerName);
		float CountStack() const;
		const int CheckHand() const;
		int PlaceBet(const float NewBet);
		void Status() const;

	private:
		float Bet;

	protected:
		vector<Card> Hand;
		int HandValue;
};

Dealer class:

class Dealer: public Player
{
	public:
		void Shuffle();
		const Card Deal();
		
	private:
		Card Shoe[209];
};

With this setup I could potentially do something like this:

Dealer.PlaceBet(20);

which would create an error.

I did think of putting functions such as PlaceBet as private within the class but then I can't use them within my main.cpp file.

Is there a way of being able to use class functions in my main.cpp file without leaving potential errors open as above?

Thanks for any guidance,

Jimbot

[IceThatJaw]

You can actually adjust method access under inheritance.

class Dealer: public Player
{
	public:
		void Shuffle();
		const Card Deal();
		
	private:
		Card Shoe[209];
                using Player::PlaceBet;  // inherits PlaceBet privately in Dealer
};

[eypros]

To make this clear you want to be able to use some function through Player objects but not through Dealer objects?

I think this can be dealt if you think about what public inheritance means: Dealer is a Player. So it should use all players functions. If it does not maybe it shouldn't be a Player (use different strategy). You can probably make both inherit from a common base class.

In special cases techniques like this the one mentioned by @IceThatJaw can be applied

[Jimbot]

Thanks for the replies.

Yes I did wonder about having another class which both dealer and player could be derived from but thought it might get a bit bloated.

As a follow up question, is there no way of using the protected section to achieve what I am after - so that I can control which functions are inherited but can still use them in my main.cpp file?

Thanks again,

Jim