why abstract class cannot be instantiated ,what is the use of a class which cannot be instantiated

Question

I know and read about abstract class and interface but one point I never understood is that, what is the use of class which cannot be instantiated. I can use normal class and virtual method instead of abstract class? what will happen when I instantiate base class?

Answer 1

You typically use an abstract class when you have some set of common functionality to be shared between derived classes. That is, you cannot use an interface because you want to provide some default functionality.

Take a look at the System.IO.Stream class. This class provides some common base functionality, but requires that specific types of streams implement some members in order for it to function. These members are also tagged abstract, which indicates to the compiler and runtime that there is no suitable base-class implementation. A non-abstract class that derives an abstract class must override all inherited abstract members, just like a class that implements an interface must implement all members defined on the interface.

In the stream example, the Read() method is abstract, but the ReadByte() method is not -- because ReadByte() can be implemented in terms of a call to Read(). (Although not optimally, which is why ReadByte() is virtual, so that a more efficient implementation can optionally be provided.) Virtual members are different, because they do have an implementation, but can optionally be overridden. Abstract members have no implementation by default, and must be overridden.

In other words, methods on an abstract class can use other abstract members on the class, even though they have no implementation! This is because a derived non-abstract class is required to provide an implementation -- an implementation is guaranteed to exist at the point that the method is invoked. This is analogous to how you can use members of an interface even though the members have no implementation on the interface, because it's guaranteed that an object implementing the interface must implement all of its members.

Subclasses like MemoryStream and FileStream override all of the abstract methods to form a concrete class, and they can be instantiated. However, you are able to store them in a Stream reference variable and treat them like a generic "black box" stream. This allows you to declare a method that accepts a Stream object, and you don't have to care what kind of stream it actually is.

Stream foo = new Stream();       // Invalid, Stream is abstract.
Stream foo = new MemoryStream(); // Valid.

So, now to summarize the answers to the questions you posed in your title. An abstract class cannot be instantiated because it may contain members that are abstract and have no implementation. The use of an abstract class is twofold: first, to be subclassed and allow the subclasses to share a common implementation of some members, and second, to allow instances of any objects of subclasses to be used through references to the abstract class.