Some people believe that the purpose of inheritance is code reuse. In C++, this is wrong. Stated plainly, "inheritance is not for code reuse."

The purpose of inheritance in C++ is to express interface compliance (subtyping), not to get code reuse. In C++, code reuse usually comes via composition rather than via inheritance. In other words, inheritance is mainly a specification technique rather than an implementation technique.

This is a major difference with Smalltalk, where there is only one form of inheritance (C++ provides private inheritance to mean "share the code but don't conform to the interface", and public inheritance to mean "kind-of"). The Smalltalk language proper (as opposed to coding practice) allows you to have the effect of "hiding" an inherited method by providing an override that calls the "does not understand" method. Furthermore Smalltalk allows a conceptual "is-a" relationship to exist apart from the inheritance hierarchy (subtypes don't have to be derived classes; e.g., you can make something that is-a Stack yet doesn't inherit from class Stack).

In contrast, C++ is more restrictive about inheritance: there's no way to make a "conceptual is-a" relationship without using inheritance (the C++ work-around is to separate interface from implementation via ABCs). The C++ compiler exploits the added semantic information associated with public inheritance to provide static typing.   _{Your Comment}