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### 257. STL functional object and iterator inheritance.

Section: 99 [depr.base], 99 [iterator.basic] Status: NAD Submitter: Robert Dick Opened: 2000-08-17 Last modified: 2016-01-28

Priority: Not Prioritized

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Discussion:

According to the November 1997 Draft Standard, the results of deleting an object of a derived class through a pointer to an object of its base class are undefined if the base class has a non-virtual destructor. Therefore, it is potentially dangerous to publicly inherit from such base classes.

Defect:
The STL design encourages users to publicly inherit from a number of classes which do nothing but specify interfaces, and which contain non-virtual destructors.

Attribution:
Wil Evers and William E. Kempf suggested this modification for functional objects.

Proposed resolution:

When a base class in the standard library is useful only as an interface specifier, i.e., when an object of the class will never be directly instantiated, specify that the class contains a protected destructor. This will prevent deletion through a pointer to the base class without performance, or space penalties (on any implementation I'm aware of).

As an example, replace...

        template <class Arg, class Result>
        struct unary_function {
                typedef Arg    argument_type;
                typedef Result result_type;
        };

... with...

        template <class Arg, class Result>
        struct unary_function {
                typedef Arg    argument_type;
                typedef Result result_type;
        protected:
                ~unary_function() {}
        };

Affected definitions:
20.3.1 [lib.function.objects] -- unary_function, binary_function
24.3.2 [lib.iterator.basic] -- iterator

Rationale:

The standard is clear as written; this is a request for change, not a defect in the strict sense. The LWG had several different objections to the proposed change. One is that it would prevent users from creating objects of type `unary_function` and `binary_function`. Doing so can sometimes be legitimate, if users want to pass temporaries as traits or tag types in generic code.