Navigating C++ and Object-Oriented Design

11.13. A Class Design Boilerplate with Inheritance

By now, you've seen the value of the class design boilerplate for creating consistent and robust classes (see Section 7.2 on page 308). The consistency of the boilerplate guarantees the assignment operator, copy constructor, and destructor all share the same code with classes that implement copy() and free(). The Modifier section of the boilerplate organizes member functions that change an object's state, and the Selector section helps manage the constant member functions that do not. A default constructor handles arrays of class objects.

Now let's modify the class design boilerplate for inheritance designs.

Listing 11.24. Class design boilerplate for inheritance

#ifndef Class_nameH #define ...