Many years ago when I didn't know much about object oriented design I heard one guy said something like "How can you write a text editor without polymorphism?" I didn't know much about OOP and so I couldn't judge how wise that though was or ask any specific questions at that time.

Now, after many years of software development (mostly C++), I've used polymorphism many times to solve various problems when designing software. Yet I've never created text editors. So I still can't evaluate that guy's idea.

Is using polymorphism so essential for implementing a text editor in object-oriented languages and why?

c++ oop polymorphism
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