[Solved] Polymorphism and pure virtual functions [closed]

What is illegal is:

Employee is an abstract base class. This line:

Employee joe;

is illegal on its own, it is creating an instance of your abstract class.

joe = HourlyEmployee();

is a bad idea even if the classes were both complete as it would slice. joe is an object, not a reference.

If HourlyEmployee remains abstract (does not implement printCheck()) then of course your line is illegal because you are creating a (temporary) instance of one.

Incidentally if both classes were complete, thus the code compiled, but printCheck() remained virtual (not pure), then

joe.printCheck();

would invoke the Employee version not the HourlyEmployee version because joe is of type Employee and remains so in spite of the assignment. That is why slicing is mostly a bad idea.