Writing a Good Constructor

Working with pointers in C requires a lot of practice to avoid memory leaks and dangling pointers. We discussed them in length in the previous post, Pointer Hazards in C . In object oriented paradigm, whenever you declare an object of user defined class type, a special function known as constructor is automatically invoked. Similarly when you want to copy an object to another object, copy constructor gets invoked. Writing an efficient and error free constructor is essential to the construction of a good program. In this post I shall explain how to write a good and efficient constructor and a copy constructor, paying special attention to pointer hazards.