When would you need to use late static binding?

Question

After reading this description of late static binding (LSB) I see pretty clearly what is going on. Now, under which sorts of circumstances might that be most useful or neede

Answer 1

It's useful when:

1. You have functionality that varies over the class hierarchy,

2. The functionality has the same signature over the hierarchy, and

3. (crucially) You don't have an instance to hang the functionality off of.

If only #1 and #2 obtained, you would use an ordinary instance method. So Alex's problem (see his answer to this question) does not require LSB.

A typical case is object creation, where subclasses create themselves in different ways, but using the same parameters. Obviously you have no instance to call, so the creation method (also known as a factory method) must be static. Yet you want its behavior to vary depending on the subclass, so an ordinary static method is not right. See Adam Franco's answer for an example.