The print method is supposed to provide a reasonably formatted print outof the state of an object. It is up the class designer nowadays to decide what a reasonable print out looks like. The signature for print is:
public: virtual void print(std::ostream& output = std::cout) const ;
For those unfamiliar with C++, this means that there are really two print methods declared in StorableObject, one with std::cout assigned to "output" and one with the user passing in the argument "output". In plain declarations, this looks like:
public: virtual void print(void) const ; // output = std::cout public: virtual void print(std::ostream& output) const ;
Only one implementation is required, however, based on the second plain declaration.
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