On Monday, 6 May 2013 at 18:44:07 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Monday, May 06, 2013 14:19:12 Henning Pohl wrote:
Documentation:
Member functions which are private or package are never
virtual,
and hence cannot be overridden.
I was about to write a bug report about this, because in my
code
there are tons of overridden methods which actually should be
private/package. Can anyone tell me why this decision has been
made? To inline them?
Do I really need to write interfaces to be able to override
these
methods?
The decision was made to make member functions virtual by
default. As soon as
that function was made, there had to be a choice for every
access level as to
whether it would be virtual or not. public and protected
obviously have to be
virtual, and in general, there's no real benefit in making
private virtual (and
there's a definite permorfance cost to programs in general if
you do), so it's
non-virtual. There's a bit of disagreement with regards to
package, but it was
decided that it wouldn't be virtual either, as it had nothing
to do with
inheritance.
If it is private, by definition, the compiler have all override
available. So it can finalize automatically.
