Possible Duplicate:
Calling virtual functions inside constructors
class Base
{
virtual void method()
{ cout << "Run by the base."; };
public:
Base() { method(); };
};
class Derived: public Base
{
void method()
{ cout << "Run by the derived."; };
};
void main()
{
Derived();
}
Output:
Run by the base.
How can one have the derived method run instead, without making a derived constructor?
You can't since the "derived" part of the object has not been constructed yet so calling a member function from it would be undefined behavior.
You can't do this without adding extra code.
A common way to achieve this is to use a private constructor and a create function that first calls the constructor (via new) and then a second finish_init method on the newly created object. This does prevent you from creating instances of the object on the stack though.
