Item 33. Manufacturing Abstract Bases
Abstract base classes typically represent abstract concepts from the problem domain, and therefore it doesn’t make sense to declare objects of those types. We make a base class abstract by declaring (or inheriting) at least one pure virtual function, and the compiler will then ensure that no objects of the abstract base class can be created.
However, there may be cases where we have no reasonable candidate for a pure virtual function but still want the class to act like an abstract base. In those cases, we can approximate the nature of an abstract class by making sure that there are no public constructors ...
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