Re: Question on private virtual methods

I use something like the following to handle serialization:

struct i_stream
{
    // functions to encode/decode types to/from a stream ...
};

struct i_serializable
{
    virtual void deserialize(const i_stream& p) = 0;
    virtual void serialize(i_stream& p) = 0;
};

struct foo : i_serializable
{
    foo() {}
    foo(const i_stream& p) { deserialize(p); }
    virtual void deserialize(const i_stream& p) { p >> a; p >> b; }
    virtual void serialize(i_stream& p) { p << a; p << b; }
    int a;
    std::string b;
};

struct bar : foo
{
    bar() {}
    bar(const i_stream& p) : foo() { deserialize(p); }
    virtual void deserialize(const i_stream& p) { foo::deserialize(p); p >>
c; p >> d; }
    virtual void serialize(i_stream& p) { foo::serialize(p); p << c; p << d; }
    int c;
    std::string d;
};

Works quite well.