Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!mcgill-vision!bloom-beacon!mintaka!yale!think!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!voder!decvax!roger
From: roger@decvax.UUCP (Roger H. Scott)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: Pure Virtual Destructors
Message-ID: <82@pascal.decvax.UUCP>
Date: 8 Feb 90 10:31:06 GMT
References: <4800082@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <4924@drutx.ATT.COM> <10382@alice.UUCP> <4982@drutx.ATT.COM> <10422@alice.UUCP> <5033@drutx.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: roger@procase.UUCP (Roger H. Scott)
Organization: proCASE Corporation, Santa Clara, CA
Lines: 15

In article <5033@drutx.ATT.COM> kvt@drutx.ATT.COM (TranKV) writes:
>Commenting on PURE VIRTUAL DESTRUCTORS
>...
>I might be ignorant here but to counter Andrew's comments:
I think the confusion here stems from Tran's misconception that a
pure virtual function "does nothing" when "called".  The only thing that
pure virtuals do when called is abort your program - if you want to do
"nothing" write "{}" as the body of your function [this may still do more
than "nothing" is the case of ctors and dtors].
It is slightly unfortunate, but less than earth-shattering, that in order
to provide a virtual "basis" for destructors in a class hierarchy you have
do declare and define a "pointless" destructor in a [quite possibly abstract]
base class.  This destructor does nothing useful and does require at least
a function call to execute [unless it is inline, but inline virtuals are a
BAD IDEA with AT&T's 2.0].