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Copy constructors are the standard way of copying objects in C++, as opposed to cloning, and have C++-specific nuances. The first argument of such a constructor is a reference to an object of the same type as is being constructed (const or non-const), which might be followed by parameters of any type (all having default values).
[5] new and delete were, in fact, introduced in the first version of C++ (then called "C with Classes") to avoid the necessity of manual object initialization. [4] In contrast to the C routines, which allow growing or shrinking an allocated array with realloc, it is not possible to change the size of a memory buffer allocated by new[].
In C++, objects are created on the stack when the constructor is invoked without the new operator, and created on the heap when the constructor is invoked with the new operator. Stack objects are deleted implicitly when they go out of scope, while heap objects must be deleted implicitly by a destructor or explicitly by using the delete operator.
The latter list is sometimes called the "initializer list" or "initialization list" (although the term "initializer list" is formally reserved for initialization of class/struct members in C++; see below). A declaration which creates a data object, instead of merely describing its existence, is commonly called a definition.
When an array of objects is declared, e.g. MyClass x[10];; or allocated dynamically, e.g. new MyClass [10]. The default constructor of MyClass is used to initialize all the elements. When a derived class constructor does not explicitly call the base class constructor in its initializer list, the default constructor for the base class is called.
Resource acquisition is initialization (RAII) [1] is a programming idiom [2] used in several object-oriented, statically typed programming languages to describe a particular language behavior. In RAII, holding a resource is a class invariant , and is tied to object lifetime .
A basic example is in the argv argument to the main function in C (and C++), which is given in the prototype as char **argv—this is because the variable argv itself is a pointer to an array of strings (an array of arrays), so *argv is a pointer to the 0th string (by convention the name of the program), and **argv is the 0th character of the ...
The motivation for inclusion of array was that it solves two problems of the C-style array: the lack of an STL-like interface, and an inability to be copied like any other object. It firstly appeared in C++ TR1 and later was incorporated into C++11.