I'll take the risk of stating the obvious: You call the function, if it's defined in the base class it's automatically available in the derived class (unless it's private).
If there is a function with the same signature in the derived class you can disambiguate it by adding the base class's name followed by two colons base_class::foo(...). You should note that unlike Java and C#, C++ does not have a keyword for "the base class" (super or base) since C++ supports multiple inheritance which may lead to ambiguity.
class left {
public:
void foo();
};
class right {
public:
void foo();
};
class bottom : public left, public right {
public:
void foo()
{
//base::foo();// ambiguous
left::foo();
right::foo();
// and when foo() is not called for 'this':
bottom b;
b.left::foo(); // calls b.foo() from 'left'
b.right::foo(); // call b.foo() from 'right'
}
};
Incidentally, you can't derive directly from the same class twice since there will be no way to refer to one of the base classes over the other.
class bottom : public left, public left { // Illegal
};