Re: Deriving from STL containers
Adrian wrote:
Lint (rightly I believe) complains that deque's destructor is not
virtual. So will the following code cause any problems?
No. The danger with a non-virtual destructor is that if you use new to
create an object of the derived type and subsequently delete it through
a pointer to the base type you get undefined behavior. Since your code
doesn't do either of those, it's fine. If you used your Container type
differently it might not be.
If I do not derive from Container does that stop problems?
Yes, certainly. If you don't have a derived type then you can't delete
an object of that type through a pointer to its base.
Do I manually have to call deque's destructor from Containers to make
sure?
No. There are very few situations where it's apropriate to explicitly
call a base class's destructor. Don't mess with that. If you delete an
object of type Container through a pointer to its base the behavior is
undefined. Nothing more can be said.
--
-- Pete
Roundhouse Consulting, Ltd. (www.versatilecoding.com)
Author of "The Standard C++ Library Extensions: a Tutorial and
Reference." (www.petebecker.com/tr1book)