what am I doing wrong

[adam2016]

Hi guys I have a small program here that sets a power of an attack,now this question is mainly about pointers so I made an enemy object and set it to the address of a ninja object,now it does allow me to set the power with the enemy object but when I try this " n.attack() " it does not work,I thought by setting the pointer to the n object that it would/could set the properties of the ninja object n because I thought I was directly accessing the object,how come this won't work,am I thinking wrong here?

Thanks

  #include <iostream>

using namespace std;

class enemy{

   public:
       void setAttackPower(int a){

           attackPower = a;
       }
   protected:
    int attackPower;

};


class ninja : public enemy{

  public:

    void attack(){

        cout << "ninja attack" << attackPower;
    }

};

class monster: public enemy{

 public:
    void attack(){

        cout << "I am a monster" << attackPower;

    }
};

int main()
{
   ninja n;
   enemy *enemy1 = &n;
   enemy1->setAttackPower(20); // working fine up to here,this is where I 
  //  thought it would set the n objects attackPower to 20 but does not
   n.attack(); 

}

[cire]

http://ideone.com/uagjnH

Hey look. n's attack power is 20.

Of course, it might've been 20 before the call to setAttackPower.

[adam2016]

but when I try to call n->attack; it does not work I'm guessing this is because the attackPower for n has not been set?

[Moschops]

it does not work

From cire's demonstration, sure looks like it works. In what way does it "not work"?

Also, why is line 44 not n.setAttackPower(20); ?

[cire]

but when I try to call n->attack;

Well, n isn't a pointer, so of course you can't dereference it with ->. If you could dereference it with -> that wouldn't be a function call as it's missing the required parentheses. n.attack() works, though, as demonstrated.

[adam2016]

thanks cire and Moschops,it does actually work I'm not sure what was going wrong for me earlier haha thanks =)