Chris Frey wrote:

To an extent, yes. Clearly IOStreams is a class hierarchy, with base classes designed to be derived from. What I dispute is whether it's a good idea to derive from the leaf classes. For one thing, stringstream has no virtual functions.

What we're inheriting here is primarily interface, not implementation. We could start inheriting far up the tree -- from basic_ostream perhaps -- and still work with all existing end-user code. Query could maintain a basic_stringbuf member, and would work just the same.

I admit, I latched onto Dale's problem report just hoping that it was more reason to make this change, and it turns out that it isn't. But the recent VC++ problems alone are enough to keep me nervous about continuing on this path.

Can you clarify that, please?