Steven Jenkins wrote:

> I hesitate to feed language comparison threads, but this is wrong. The
> only person who can state with authority the design criteria for C++ is
> Bjarne Stroustrup, and he said "My initial aim for C++ was a language
> where I could write programs that were as elegant as Simula programs,
> yet as efficient as C programs." You can't conclude from this statement
> that elegance is secondary to efficiency.

No advocacy is needed to discuss this - it's an axiom of C++'s design. If
you don't have a virtual destructor, and you delete thru a base class
pointer, you get undefined behavior. C++ programmers learn their art by
learning a humongous list of trivial ways to create undefined behavior. The
language won't do anything you don't explicitly tell it to; this gives
compilers freedom to optimize aggressively.

To Bjarne's credit, the language he built works relatively elegantly within
the framework of that era's compilers (and linkers). That's why C++ won the
"C wars".

-- 
  Phlip
  http://industrialxp.org/community/bin/view/Main/TestFirstUserInterfaces