CMPT 212 Object-Oriented Applications Design in C++ Fall 1997

Classes with Pointers to Dynamic Memory (continued)

• If the constructor allocates dynamic memory, the destructor should almost always release it, unless there is a very good reason not to. In that case, the comments in the program should describe exactly what is going on and why.

• If we didn't write our own copy constructor, an implicit copy constructor would be used whenever we needed to copy a sentence.
  • The implicit copy constructor would do a shallow copy. It would copy the pointers, but not what they point to.

  • Since we want a deep copy, we must write our own copy constructor.

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