C++: A Dialog Programming with the C++ Standard Library

Review

We've almost finished building our own version of a concrete data type called string, which provides a means of storing and processing a group of characters in a more convenient form than a C string. The fact that string is a concrete data type means that a string that is defined as a local variable in a block should be created when the code in the block begins execution and automatically destroyed when the block ends. Another requirement for a concrete data type is to be able to copy one variable of that type to another variable of the same type and have the two copies behave like independent variables, not linked together in the manner of Siamese twins.

As we've previously noted, the creation of an object is performed by a special member ...