About calling an subclass' overriding method when casted to its superclass

Posted by Omega on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Omega
Published on 2013-10-20T21:45:47Z Indexed on 2013/10/20 21:54 UTC
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#include <iostream>

class Vehicle { 
public:
    void greet() {
        std::cout << "Hello, I'm a vehicle";
    }
};

class Car : public Vehicle { 
public:
    void greet() {
        std::cout << "Hello, I'm a car";
    }
};

class Bike : public Vehicle { 
public:
    void greet() {
        std::cout << "Hello, I'm a bike";
    }
};

void receiveVehicle(Vehicle vehicle) {
    vehicle.greet();
}

int main() {
    receiveVehicle(Car());
    return 0;
}

As you can see, I'm trying to send a parameter of type Vehicle to a function, which calls greet().

Car and Bike are subclasses of Vehicle. They overwrite greet().

However, I'm getting "Hello, I'm a vehicle".

I suppose that this is because receiveVehicle receives a parameter of type Vehicle instead of a specific subclass like Car or Bike. But that's what I want: I want this function to work with any subclass of Vehicle.

Why am I not getting the expected output?

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