Re: Some thoughts on polymorphism

From:
=?iso-8859-1?q?Kirit_S=E6lensminde?= <kirit.saelensminde@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
2 May 2007 20:37:56 -0700
Message-ID:
<1178163476.724423.204640@n76g2000hsh.googlegroups.com>
On May 3, 12:51 am, faceman28...@yahoo.com wrote:

On May 1, 11:43 pm, chsal...@gmail.com wrote:

I've been programming in C++ for a little over 2 years, and I still
find myself wondering when I should use polymorphism.


The reality is polymorphism really doesn't show great value unless you
have a sufficent number number of related classes. Thus most academic
examples are pretty worthless.


In some ways it is only a minor point, but polymorphism isn't
inheritance, although inheritance is a form of polymorphism. There are
many other polymorphic constructs in C++.

std::list (and the rest of the STL containers) are polymorphic
classes. std::max is a polymorphic function as are the ones in
<algorithm>. Even the C operator + (which C++ inherits) is
polymorphic.

There are lots and lots of forms of polymorphism and many of them can
be used in C++ (but not all of them). Some of the ones that C++
doesn't support are still very useful to understand. For example row
polymorphism can be used to analyse the type constraints that
templates impose.

K

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