Constructors and multiple virtual inheritance -- bug or feature?

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Dec  9, 1998, csk@cs.washington.edu (Craig Kaplan) wrote:

> I can understand why D needs to explicitly call A's constructor -- for
> if not, then the initialization of A is ambiguous.  But it's by no means
> ambiguous for E, since E's constructor can rely on D's constructor to
> initialize the A part.

It can't.  In C++, in the presence of virtual inheritance, it's always 
the most derived class that must initialize all virtually-inherited
sub-objects.

> I should be able to singly inherit from any class without having to
> know about the initialization nightmares of its ancestry.

Then avoid virtual inheritance.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva  http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~oliva  aoliva@{acm.org}
oliva@{dcc.unicamp.br,gnu.org,egcs.cygnus.com,samba.org}
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, SP, Brasil