Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours, Third Edition

Hour 18. Advanced Polymorphism

In the previous hours, you learned how to write virtual functions in derived classes. The fundamental building block of polymorphism is the capability to bind specific, derived class objects to base class pointers at runtime. Now you will learn

• What “casting down” is and why you might want to do it

• What abstract data types are

• What pure virtual functions are