Class inheritance error: Private member

Question

I've got one base class/parent class: Person

And two subclasses/child classes: Player, Coach

This is what the header for the base class Person looks like:

class Person
{
    public:
        Person(string name);
        Person();
        virtual ~Person();
        string getName();
        void setName(string name);
        virtual void printSpec() const = 0;

    private:
        string name;
};

I tried to compile and run, it started complaining about this:

include\Person.h||In constructor 'Coach::Coach(std::string, std::string)':|
include\Person.h|19|error: 'std::string Person::name' is private|
\src\Coach.cpp|5|error: within this context|
||=== Build finished: 2 errors, 0 warnings ===|

And pointed to this:

private:
    string name;

In the context of one out of two constructors for the child class "Coach":

Coach::Coach(string name, string responsibility): Person(name){
    this->name = name;
    this->responsibility = responsibility;
}

However, it doesn't make the same complaint about that very same line in the constructor of the "Player"-class, only complains about "string name being a private member" in the constructor of the "Coach"-class.

I looked up some solutions for other people, tried protected instead of private, tried changing the names of the variables, but to no use.

What gives?

Answer 1

A private member cannot be accessed by derived class.

The solution could be to use the member-initialization-list to do that :

Coach::Coach(string name, string responsibility): Person(name){
    //                                            ^^^^^^^^^^^^
    //                     Initialize the name through the base class constructor
    this->responsibility = responsibility;
}

Because Person is the base-class and have a constructor that takes a name, you can do it that way. You don't need to access the name member from the derived class.

---

Another solution could be to set this member protected (the first solution is still better).

class Person
{
    public:
        Person(string name);
        Person();
        virtual ~Person();
        string getName();
        void setName(string name);
        virtual void printSpec() const = 0;

    protected:
//  ^^^^^^^^^
        string name;
};

You can take a look here, the inheritance part talk about access-type.

---

Not to answer the question but for some good practice, I would suggest you to pass your string parameter as const reference. It is a better practice :

Coach::Coach(const string& name, const string& responsibility): Person(name){
    //       ^^^^^       ^       ^^^^^       ^
    this->responsibility = responsibility;
}