If you were stringent you wouldn't instanciate this abstract class but only
subclassed concrete classes for concrete devices. Abstract does not
have anything to do with not accessing (meta) data.

In fact in an earlier discussion we found that VFP is good in a kind
of abstract classes thet get concrete at runtime and that this isn't
a bad decision.

But like Christof said it's hard to understand why a device should
suddenly change. If you interpret your concrete device object as that
device and have a seperate communication class which instanciates
the proper device class, then you can split functionality.

Why is that data access your concern? Because you already
programmed the initial configuration of the device object is taking
place from outside? Or because all data access is done by data
access classes and you want to make the device class work
with those data access classes on the one side, to be stringent,
but you also want it to be a self contained class which does not
only work in conjunction with this kind of data acess object?

Bye, Olaf.