need a virtual template member workaround

Question

I need to write a program implementing the visitor design pattern. The problem is that the base visitor class is a template class. This means that BaseVisited::accept() takes a template class as a parameter and since it uses 'this' and i need 'this' to point to the correct runtime instance of the object, it also needs to be virtual.
I'd like to know if there's any way around this problem.

template <typename T>
class BaseVisitor {
  public:
    BaseVisitor();
    T visit(BaseVisited *visited);
    virtual ~BaseVisitor();
}


class BaseVisited {
  BaseVisited();
  template <typename T>
    virtual void accept(BaseVisitor<T> *visitor) { visitor->visit(this); }; // problem
  virtual ~BaseVisited();
}

Answer 1

What you should do is separate the BaseVisitor.

class BaseVisited;
class BaseVisitorInternal {
public:
    virtual void visit(BaseVisited*) = 0;
    virtual ~BaseVisitorInternal() {}
};
class BaseVisited {
    BaseVisited();
    virtual void accept(BaseVisitorInternal* visitor) { visitor->visit(this); }
};
template<typename T> class BaseVisitor : public BaseVisitorInternal {
    void visit(BaseVisited* visited);
};

If you need BaseVisited's derived classes to be templated too AND pass their correct types/overloads to visit, you're officially dead.

Answer 2

I came up with something slightly different than DeadMG:

class BaseVisited;

class IVisitor {
  public:
    virtual void visit(BaseVisited *visited) = 0;
    virtual ~IVisitor();
};

template <typename T>
class BaseVisitor : public IVisitor {
  public:
    BaseVisitor();
    virtual void visit(BaseVisited *visited);
    virtual ~BaseVisitor();
    virtual T result();
};


class BaseVisited {
  public:
    BaseVisited();
    virtual void accept(IVisitor *visitor) { visitor->visit(this); };
    virtual ~BaseVisited();
};

Mine has an extra result() member function that lets you retrieve the result of the last visit.