C++ Primer Plus

Destructors

When you use a constructor to create an object, the program undertakes the responsibility of tracking that object until it expires. At that time, the program automatically calls a special member function bearing the formidable title destructor. The destructor should clean up any debris, so it actually serves a useful purpose. For example, if your constructor uses new to allocate memory, the destructor should use delete to free that memory. The Stock constructor doesn’t do anything fancy like using new, so the Stock class destructor doesn’t really have any tasks to perform. In such a case, you can simply let the compiler generate an implicit, do-nothing destructor, which is exactly what the first version of the Stock class does. On ...