Learning C++: returning references AND getting around slicing

Question

I\'m having a devil of a time understanding references. Consider the following code:

class Animal
{
public:
    virtual void makeSound() {cout << \"rawr\"         


        

Answer 1

If you want to return a polymorphic type from a method and don't want to assign it on the heap you could consider making it a field in that method's class and making the function to return a pointer to it of whatever base class you want.