Question

I’d like to make object of class not copyable so I put copy constructor and operator= in private section. However one class is friend of this class so it has access to private methods. Is it good idea to put throw exception in copy constructor and operator= to be sure that object will not be copied?

Answer 1

One approach to make it not copyable is just to declare the copy constructor, but don’t implement it at all. That will force a linker error at compile time if anyone tries to use it.

class foo
{
private:
    foo(const foo&); // not defined
    foo& operator=(const foo&); // not defined
};