FAQ 30.02 What are the Big Three?

Destructor, copy constructor, and assignment operator.

These infrastructure routines provide the death and copy semantics for objects of the class. Here is some sample syntax:

 class Fred { public:   ~Fred() throw();                          // Destructor   Fred(const Fred& x) throw();              // Copy Constructor   Fred& operator= (const Fred& x) throw();  // Assignment Operator }; Fred::~Fred() throw() { /*...*/ } Fred::Fred(const Fred& x) throw() { /*...*/ } Fred& Fred::operator= (const Fred& x) throw() {   // ...   return *this; }