Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ncis.llnl.gov!helios.ee.lbl.gov!nosc!cod!mball
From: mball@cod.NOSC.MIL (Michael S. Ball)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: Virtual destructors
Keywords: virtual destructor portability
Message-ID: <1430@cod.NOSC.MIL>
Date: 1 Mar 89 05:20:11 GMT
References: <551@hrc63.co.uk>
Reply-To: mball@cod.nosc.mil.UUCP (Michael S. Ball)
Organization: Naval Ocean Systems Center, San Diego
Lines: 21

In article <551@hrc63.co.uk> pj@hrc63.co.uk (Mr P Johnson "Baddow") writes:
>In Oregon C++ (for Suns) v 1.1, it is possible to declare the base destructor
>as virtual.  This then ensures that the appropriate destructor is called for
>any derived classes provided that the _derived_class_has_a_destructor_.  If
>the derived class has no explicit destructor then any member destructors will
>not be called (rather than being called implicitly as they would be normally).

I believe this is a bug.  I will check on it and see that it gets handled
if it is.  This is the first time it has been reported, and it's not a
well-defined area of the language.  On logical grounds, though, it seems that
if the base class destructor is virtual the one generated for the derived
class should be as well.

Thanks for pointing it out.  If it turns out that the derived class shouldn't
be virtual, I'll make another posting on the subject.

Mike Ball
TauMetric Corporation
1094 Cudahy Place., Ste 302
San Diego, CA 92110
mball@cod.nosc.mil