[vtk-developers] abstract/concrete etc

[John Biddiscombe]

>Anyway, I'm getting philosophical here at your expense (and perhaps
>I'm trying the patience of others on this mailing list).  My only
>problem with the change is that it will require me to rewrite some
>of my code, and all I ask is that you give me some time to think
>up an alternative way to write my own code such that I no longer
>need to create bare naked vtkObjects.

Apologies. I misread your email and didn't quite realize you were creating 
vtkObjects as timestampers. This is (I suppose) a legit use of an otherwise 
abstract class. Damn.

I'll get around this by adding new flags to my code to allow users to clear 
the concrete flag when the wrapper generator fails - or is inappropriate.

I would point out in my defence that the definitions of Abstract and 
Concrete are a bit arbitrary in the makefiles. vtkImageWindow, 
vtkPolyDataMapper are declared as concrete (because the object factory 
substitutes a vtkOpenGLImageMapper etc etc), but in fact they contains pure 
virtual functions so they really are abstract in the strictest C++ sense.

ttfn

JB