The idea is that inheritance is a way to express an "is a" relationship; in the above, Circle is an Ellipse, which is a Shape, thus, transitively, Circle is also a Shape. Implicitly, Shape is an ...
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To quote Bjarne Stroustrup, "Multiple inheritance is like a parachute. Most of the time you don't need it, but when you do need it, you really need it." In the early days of C++, before templates, one ...