C++ How to Program, 10/e

9.7 Destructors

A destructor is another type of special member function. The name of the destructor for a class is the tilde character (~) followed by the class name. This naming convention has intuitive appeal, because as we’ll see in a later chapter, the tilde operator is the bitwise complement operator, and, in a sense, the destructor is the complement of the constructor. A destructor may not specify parameters or a return type.

A class’s destructor is called implicitly when an object is destroyed. This occurs, for example, as an object is destroyed when program execution leaves the scope in which that object was instantiated. The destructor itself does not actually release the object’s memory—it performs termination housekeeping3 before ...