C++ Primer, Fifth Edition

13.1.6. Preventing Copies

Best Practices

Most classes should define—either implicitly or explicitly—the default and copy constructors and the copy-assignment operator.

Although most classes should (and generally do) define a copy constructor and a copy-assignment operator, for some classes, there really is no sensible meaning for these operations. In such cases, the class must be defined so as to prevent copies or assignments from being made. For example, the iostream classes prevent copying to avoid letting multiple objects write to or read from the same IO buffer. It might seem that we could prevent copies by not defining the copy-control ...