Re: If a class has a virtual destructor

From:

Pete Becker <pete@versatilecoding.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.c++.moderated

Date:

Wed, 8 Aug 2007 15:12:00 CST

Message-ID:

<2007080814341116807-pete@versatilecodingcom>

On 2007-08-08 08:03:02 -0400, HumbleWorker
<amardeep.developer@gmail.com> said:

Alf wrote:

But, it's not guaranteed to do anything sensible, because in the case
where the class T to be tested has non-virtual destructor, deleting a
Derived via a pointer to T has formally Undefined Behavior.

COMMENTS OF HW: The behaviour is undefined in the sense that the
derived class destructor is not called when the base class destructor
is non-virtual, and therefore, the destruction is incomplete and
buggy.

The behavior is undefined in the sense that the C++ standard does not
impose any requirements on a program with this code.

Of course, this is dangerous and compilers do issue warnings.
But here we KNOW what we are doing and we know that no memory leak is

How do you KNOW what this code will do? Does your compiler's
documentation tell you?

--
Pete
Roundhouse Consulting, Ltd. (www.versatilecoding.com) Author of "The
Standard C++ Library Extensions: a Tutorial and Reference
(www.petebecker.com/tr1book)

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