Why does debugging "pure virtual method called" have to be so hard?

[Joe Buck]

> Calling a pure virtual function is not a case of exception handling,
> so it might be strange to call it in such a situation.

This is too bad.  I wish the committee had specified that an exception
be thrown here; it would be consistent with the rest of the language.
Everywhere else, if the user does something illegal that can't be caught
at compile time (e.g. bad dynamic cast of a reference), we throw an exception.

> ... calling a pure virtual function has undefined behavior ...
which means we can do what we want.

I vote for
	throw __pure_virtual_exception;

where that class is derived from class std::exception.