title: protected ifstream member
body: <p>I am close to completion of my first OOP project, coming from a C background. I was wondering a design issue related to some ifstream object that I use in the base class to open a file. After that I would like to use the same stream to do further operation by the derived classes. I defined only this member as a protected one so I could reach that in the derived classes, protected breaks the encapsulation(I would like to earn good habits), should I define some getter function to return a reference to a stream object? Since the ifstream objects are not copiable, that might be a problem, first thing I see...</p>
  
  <p>Best,
  Umut </p>