February 3, 1998

If you do not define a copy constructor and operator = , the compiler will create them automatically for you. However, there are cases when you have to define them

Using #define to create macro constants is not ideal. Macros are substituted by the preprocessor, so the compiler usually cannot detect anomalies such as type mismatch (see example); furthermore, most

One of the good things about destructors is that they are called automatically. There are rare cases, however, when you want to invoke an object

There are cases where you have to define several constructors (or constructors and operator = ) within one class, all of which perform some identical tasks (e.g., initialize members, allocate