310 ◾ Glossary
contraction: refers to an inheritance design that reduces (contracts) the
inherited parent interface by suppressing (or NOPing) one or
more inherited public functions.
control ow: is the trace of the statements executed in sequence as so-
ware runs, which is the soware’s executable path.
copy constructor: is the constructor that initializes a newly allocated
object by copying the state (value of all data members) of a passed
object. If not dened by the class designer, the C++ compiler
generates a copy constructor that performs a bitwise copy on all
elds—a design landmine if a C++ class allocates heap memory
internally. C# does not provide a copy constructor.
coupling: is a soware engineering measure of the degree of ...