Software Object Constructor

A Software Object Constructor is a software subroutine that creates software objects.

• AKA: Class-Constructor, ctor.
• Context:
  • It can range from being a Default Constructor to being ...
  • It can range from being a Private Constructor to being a Public Constructor.
• Example(s):
  • a Java Constructor.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • an Instance Method.
• See: Object Pool, Class-Based Programming, Object-Oriented Programming, Class (Computer Programming), Subroutine, Object Creation, Member Variable, Software Object Method, Return Type, Object Inheritance, Software Object Class, Software Item Initialization.

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References

2016

• http://python-textbok.readthedocs.io/en/1.0/Classes.html
  • QUOTE: __init__ is sometimes called the object’s constructor, because it is used similarly to the way that constructors are used in other languages, but that is not technically correct – it’s better to call it the initialiser. There is a different method called __new__ which is more analogous to a constructor, but it is hardly ever used.

2015

• (Wikipedia, 2015) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/constructor_(object-oriented_programming) Retrieved:2015-2-13.
  • In class-based object-oriented programming, a constructor (abbreviation: ctor) in a class is a special type of subroutine called to create an object. It prepares the new object for use, often accepting arguments that the constructor uses to set required member variables.

    A constructor resembles an instance method, but it differs from a method in that it has no explicit return type, it is not implicitly inherited and it usually has different rules for scope modifiers. Constructors often have the same name as the declaring class. They have the task of initializing the object's data members and of establishing the invariant of the class, failing if the invariant is invalid. A properly written constructor leaves the resulting object in a valid state. Immutable objects must be initialized in a constructor.

    Programmers also use the term constructor to denote one of the tags that wraps data in an algebraic data type. This is a different usage than in this article. Most languages allow overloading the constructor in that there can be more than one constructor for a class, with differing parameters. Some languages take consideration of some special types of constructors. Constructors, which concretely use a single class to create objects and return a new instance of the class, are abstracted by factories, which also create objects but can do so in various ways, using multiple classes or different allocation schemes such as an object pool.

2015

• https://stackoverflow.com/a/8212438
  • QUOTE: In essence, it's impossible both because python does not use constructors the way you may think it does if you come from other OOP languages and because python does not enforce privacy, it just has a specific syntax to suggest that a given method/property should be considered as private. Let me elaborate...

    First: the closest to a constructor that you can find in python is the __new__ method but this is very very seldom used (you normally use __init__, which modify the just created object (in fact it already has self as first parameter).

    Regardless, python is based on the assumption everybody is a consenting adult, thus private/public is not enforced as some other language do.

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