Use-cases of pure virtual functions with body?

Question

I recently came to know that in C++ pure virtual functions can optionally have a body.

What are the real-world use cases for such functions?

Answer 1

One reason that an abstract base class (with a pure virtual function) might provide an implementation for a pure virtual function it declares is to let derived classes have an easy 'default' they can choose to use. There isn't a whole lot of advantage to this over a normal virtual function that can be optionally overridden - in fact, the only real difference is that you're forcing the derived class to be explicit about using the 'default' base class implementation:

class foo {
public:
    virtual int interface();
};

int foo::interface() 
{
    printf( "default foo::interface() called\n");
    return 0;
};


class pure_foo {
public:
    virtual int interface() = 0;
};

int pure_foo::interface()
{
    printf( "default pure_foo::interface() called\n");
    return 42;
}

//------------------------------------

class foobar : public foo {
    // no need to override to get default behavior
};

class foobar2 : public pure_foo {
public:
    // need to be explicit about the override, even to get default behavior
    virtual int interface();
};

int foobar2::interface()
{
    // foobar is lazy; it'll just use pure_foo's default
    return pure_foo::interface();
}

I'm not sure there's a whole lot of benefit - maybe in cases where a design started out with an abstract class, then over time found that a lot of the derived concrete classes were implementing the same behavior, so they decided to move that behavior into a base class implementation for the pure virtual function.

I suppose it might also be reasonable to put common behavior into the pure virtual function's base class implementation that the derived classes might be expected to modify/enhance/augment.