Copying a Polymorphic object in C++

This is still how we do stuff in C++ for polymorphic classes, but you don't need to do the explicit copy of members if you create a copy constructor (possibly implicit or private) for your objects.

class Base
{
public:
  virtual Base* Clone() = 0;
};

class Derivedn : public Base
{
public:
  //This is OK, its called covariant return type.
  Derivedn* Clone() 
  {
    return new Derivedn(*this);
  }
private:
  Derivedn(const Derivedn&) : ... {}
};