Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design

Special Object Methods

I have talked about methods that are called by other objects or possibly used by an object itself. But what happens when objects are created? What happens when they go away? If objects are self-contained units, then it would be a good idea to have methods to handle these situations.

These special methods do, in fact, exist and are called constructors and destructors.

A constructor is a special method that is automatically called when the object is created. Its purpose is to handle starting up the object. This is part of an object's mandate to be responsible for itself. The constructor is the natural place to do initializations, set default information, set up relationships with other objects, or do anything else that is ...