Re: virtual fn, destructor

From:

Pete Becker <pete@versatilecoding.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.c++

Date:

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 07:50:33 -0500

Message-ID:

<2008121807503316807-pete@versatilecodingcom>

On 2008-12-18 04:46:28 -0500, James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com> said:

On Dec 17, 10:11 pm, "DavidW" <n...@email.provided> wrote:

Pete Becker wrote:

On 2008-12-16 18:42:22 -0500, "DavidW" <n...@email.provided> said:

Pete Becker wrote:

On 2008-12-16 15:45:47 -0500, "DavidW" <n...@email.provided> said:

[...]

My documentation is a text presentation that, among other
things, documents the design decision: don't delete derived
types through a pointer to my class. A protected destructor
is code, not documentation. A comment is code, not
documentation.

Unless you're using Doxygen:-).

Seriously, there should be a relationship between the comments
and the code.

Sure. But the claim that you snipped was that my documentation
consisted of a protected destructor and comments. The user of a class
shouldn't have to read the code and comments to figure out how to use
it.

And there's nothing wrong with enforcing the
contract, when feasable; if the contract says that client code
should not destruct instances of the object (only reasonable if
all instances are allocated dynamically), then declaring the
destructor protected (or private, if you're not supporting
inheritance) seems correct, just as it would be for any other
function. (Surely, Pete, you're not saying that we shouldn't
use private and public, because the documentation should be
enough.)

Of course not. But that's not documentation.

--
Pete
Roundhouse Consulting, Ltd. (www.versatilecoding.com) Author of "The
Standard C++ Library Extensions: a Tutorial and Reference
(www.petebecker.com/tr1book)