orphism using people that a company might be interested in. They are defined in the following classes: class person{ protected: char *name, *ident, *address, *phone; public: person(char *n, char *i, char *a, char *p); char *get_name(void); char *get_ident(void); char *get_address(void); char *get_phone(void); void set_address(char *a); void set_phone(char *p); void print(void); }; class customer: public person { protected: int rating, balance; etc etc etc }; class employee: public person { protected: char *jobtitle, *supervisor; int salary; etc etc etc }; class family: public person { protected: char *employee; etc etc etc }; class stockholder: public person { protected: int numshares; etc etc etc }; Through the mechanism of inheritance, all the four classes inherit the members: members name, ident, address, and phone; and the methods: get_name, get_ident, get_address, get_phone, set_address, set_phone, and print from person. Thus, no matter what extra functionality these classes have, they are always guaranteed to have all the functionality of a person. Anything you can possibly do to or with a person, you must also be able to do to or with a customer. A customer is a kind of person. Without polymorphism, we would need a different list for each class and would also need to define separate but almost identical functions for searching each of the four arrays, and just about every other operation: { customer *custs[1000]; employee *emps[1000]; family *empfam[1000]; stockholder *owners[100]; ... custs[33]=new customer("...","...",...); ... emps[175]=new employee("...","...",...); ... }. With polymorphism, we only need one array and just one search function: { person *everyone[10000]; ... everyone[33]=new customer("...","...",...); ... everyone[175]=new employee("...","...",...); ... }person *find(char *nm){ int i; for (i=0; i*NUMPEOPLE; strcmp(everyone[i]- ...
