Mary Ann Hainsworth, started working as a Resource Conservationist under the ACES Program in January of 2011 after retiring from NRCS. She provides assistance for the Wellington Field Office with everything from staking in the field to conservation contract support.
It is convenient to overload commonly used functions to work with objects of your class. For example, suppose that a class defines a property that stores data that you often graph. The MyData bar method has the same name as the MATLAB bar function. However, the MyData bar method requires a MyData object as input.
Virtual functions ensure that the correct function is called for an object, regardless of the expression used to make the function call. Suppose a base class contains a function declared as virtual and a derived class defines the same function. The function from the derived class is invoked for objects of the derived class, even if it is called using a pointer or reference to the base class.