C++ Primer Plus

ABC Philosophy

The ABC methodology is a much more systematic, disciplined way to approach inheritance than the more ad hoc, spur-of-the-moment approach used by the RatedPlayer example. Before designing an ABC, you first have to develop a model of what classes are needed to represent a programming problem and how they relate to one another. One school of thought holds that if you design an inheritance hierarchy of classes, the only concrete classes should be those that never serve as a base class. This approach tends to produce cleaner designs with fewer complications.

One way of thinking about ABCs is to consider them an enforcement of interface. An ABC demands that its pure virtual functions be overridden in any concrete derived classes—forcing ...