C++ Templates: The Complete Guide

Chapter 16. Templates and Inheritance

A priori, there might be no reason to think that templates and inheritance interact in interesting ways. If anything, we know from Chapter 9 that deriving from dependent base classes forces us to deal carefully with unqualified names. However, it turns out that some interesting techniques make use of so-called parameterized inheritance. In this chapter we describe a few of these techniques.

16.1 Named Template Arguments

Various template techniques sometimes cause a class template to end up with many different template type parameters. However, many of these parameters often have reasonable default values. A natural way to define such a class template may look as follows:

template<typename Policy1 = DefaultPolicy1, ...