October 2004
Intermediate to advanced
240 pages
6h 22m
English
book
C++ Coding Standards: 101 Rules, Guidelines, and Best Practices
by Herb Sutter, Andrei Alexandrescu
Content preview from C++ Coding Standards: 101 Rules, Guidelines, and Best Practices
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36. Prefer providing abstract interfaces
Summary
Love abstract art: Abstract interfaces help you focus on getting an abstraction right without muddling it with implementation or state management details. Prefer to design hierarchies that implement abstract interfaces that model abstract concepts.
Discussion
Prefer to define and inherit from abstract interfaces. An abstract interface is an abstract class made up entirely of (pure) virtual functions and having no state (member data) and usually no member function implementations. Note that avoiding state in abstract interfaces simplifies the entire hierarchy design (see [Meyers96] for examples).
Prefer to follow the Dependency Inversion Principle (DIP; see [Martin96a] and [Martin00]). The DIP ...