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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90. Avoid type switching; prefer polymorphism
Summary
Switch off: Avoid switching on the type of an object to customize behavior. Use templates and virtual functions to let types (not their calling code) decide their behavior.
Discussion
Type switching to customize behavior is brittle, error-prone, unsafe, and a clear sign of attempting to write C or Fortran code in C++. It is a rigid technique that forces you to go back and do surgery on existing code whenever you want to add new features. It is also unsafe because the compiler will not tell you if you forget to modify all of the switches when you add a type.
Ideally, adding new features to a program equates to adding more new code (see Item 37). In reality, we know that that’s not always ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.