i think horton on pg569 -- see NOTE -- may have missed the fact that a call to the derived class constructor or copy constructor calls the base class constructor before dropping into the derived class constructor.

his statement " ...you are responsible for the initialization of all members of the derived class object, including all its inherited members

this makes sence in that before the derived class constructor is called the base class must be put into a sane state.

am i missing something?

david