Re: Polymorphism and ostream &operator<<()

From:
Sam <sam@email-scan.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Tue, 16 Jun 2009 21:18:22 -0500
Message-ID:
<cone.1245205101.647260.22656.500@commodore.email-scan.com>
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Jeff Dege writes:

One obvious way to make this work is to provide some sort of output
member function within the classes, marked virtual so that we get the
polymorphism we desire, then to implement an ostream &operator<<() on the
parent class that calls that member function:

class Parent;
std::ostream &operator<<(std::ostream &o, const Parent &parent)
{
   return o << Parent.to_string();
}

But I can envision situations where this might not be an ideal solution.
If the internal representation of an object might result in a very large
string, this approach could have significant performance penalties.


In that case:

class Parent;
std::ostream &operator<<(std::ostream &o, const Parent &parent)
{
    return parent.to_stream(o);
}

Then, do whatever you want in parent::to_stream(std::ostream &o);

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