Why is this program crashing ? Did I wrongly allocate memory? - c++

Question

Question
Design a class Employee with name and employee number. Derive Manager, Scientist and Laborer classes. The manager class has extra attributes title and dues. The scientist class has extra attribute number of publications. The Laborer class has nothing extra. The classes have necessary functions for set and display the information.
My solution
#include<iostream>
#include<cstring>
using namespace std;
class employee
{
protected:
char *name;
int number;
public:
employee()
{
cout<<"enter employee name \n";
cin>>name;
cout<<"enter employee number \n";
cin>>number;
}
void display()
{
cout<<"name \t"<<name<<endl;
cout<<"number \t"<<number<<endl;
// inside class function is a inline function
}
};
class manager: private employee
{
float due;
char *title;
public:
manager( )
{
cout<<"due\t "<<endl;
cin>>due;
cout<<"title\t"<<endl;
cin>>title;
fflush(stdin);
}
void display()
{
employee::display(); //inside class function is a inline function
cout<<"due\t"<<due<<endl;
cout<<"title\t"<<title<<endl;
//inside class function is a inline function
}
};
class labour :private employee
{
public:
void display()
{
employee::display(); //inside class function is a inline function
}
};
class Scientist :private employee
{
int number;
public:
Scientist()
{
cout<<"publication number "<<endl;
cin>>Scientist::number;
}
void display()
{
employee::display();
cout<<" pub number "<<Scientist::number<<endl;
fflush(stdin);
} //inside class function is a inline function
};
int main()
{
manager m;
m.display();
Scientist s;
s. display();
labour l;
l.display();
return 0;
}

Answer 1

You don't allocate any memory for title or name, so you can't read into them from std::cin. Instead of using char* you should use std::string which will do all of the allocation for you:
std::string title;
std::string name;

Answer 2

In the constructor of empolyee you read into an uninitialized char*. Therefore it does not point to a valid block of memory where you could store the entered name to. You could do
name = static_cast<char*>(malloc( 32 * sizeof(char) ));
to allocate memory such that name points to valid memory, but you always waste memory or do not have enough for the input. Also you have to free the memory in the destructor.
As Peter Schneider wrote in the comment of this answer, another option is to use arrays of a fixed size as a member, e.g.
char name[MAX_NAME_LENGTH];
with a e.g. preprocessor defined
#define MAX_NAME_LENGTH 64
at the top of your file. This way the copy constructor does his job. With pointers as members, you always have to write them yourself, otherwise, the original class instance and copied instance will have a member pointer pointing to the same memory. So if one the copied instance changes the name, the original instance will have a changed name, too.
The easiest solution would be to use a std::string instead of char*. It allocates memory on its own and you don't have to free anything and copying works fine, too.