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Software Engineering

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  • One of his criteria for a concrete type is that you can create one on the stack. I'm guessing that you can't create an abstract type on the stack because its size can't be determined. (Similarly, I believe, you can't make a container of base class objects - e.g. your animals - and expect to be able to add derived class objects to it, because they'll be truncated [wrong word]). Commented Dec 16, 2013 at 1:37
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    That's correct. (The word is object slicing). Commented Dec 16, 2013 at 7:33
  • "concrete == !abstract" is standard definition from eg. Java, but not exactly what Stroustrup meant. For him concrete class is more like plain data structure + invariant, without OOP staff like inheritance. Commented Feb 7, 2019 at 12:43