Possible C++ method signature warning feature?

[Paul Koning <paulkoning@comcast.net>]

There's a C++ problem I keep running into, in a very large body of software with lots of subclassing.

There's a base class that defines a set of interface methods, not all pure virtual (some define the default behavior).  A number of subclasses override some but not all of these.

Now I find myself changing the argument list of some of these methods, so I have to change the base class definitions and also track down all the subclass redefinitions.  If I miss one of the latter, that subclass method is no longer called (it now just looks like an unrelated method with a different argument list that isn't used anywhere).  Finding these things can be hard and time consuming.

It would be helpful to have some way to mark a method as "this is supposed to be an override of a base class method", in other words "warn me if this method doesn't override some method in a base class".

Does that sound like a possible thing to do, perhaps with some __attribute__ magic?  Would it be interesting?

	paul