C++ Primer, Fifth Edition

15.9.1. An Object-Oriented Solution

We might think that we should use the TextQuery class from §12.3.2 (p. 487) to represent our word query and derive our other queries from that class.

However, this design would be flawed. To see why, consider a Not query. A Word query looks for a particular word. In order for a Not query to be a kind of Word query, we would have to be able to identify the word for which the Not query was searching. In general, there is no such word. Instead, a Not query has a query (a Word query or any other kind of query) whose value it negates. Similarly, an And query and an Or query have two queries whose results it combines.

This observation suggests that we model our different kinds of queries as independent classes that ...