Initialization & Cleanup
As the computer revolution progresses, “unsafe” programming has become one of the major culprits that makes programming expensive.
Two of these safety issues are initialization and cleanup. Many C bugs occur when the programmer forgets to initialize a variable. This is especially true with libraries when users don’t know how to initialize a library component, or even that they must. Cleanup is a special problem because it’s easy to forget about an element when you’re done with it, since it no longer concerns you. Thus, the resources used by that element are retained and you can easily end up running out of resources (most notably, memory).
C++ introduced the concept of a constructor, a special method automatically called when an object is created. Java also adopted the constructor, and in addition has a garbage collector that automatically releases memory resources when they’re no longer being used. This chapter examines the issues of initialization and cleanup, and their support in Java.
Guaranteed initialization with the constructor
You can imagine creating a method called initialize( ) for every class you write. The name is a hint that it should be called before using the object. Unfortunately, this means the user must remember to call that method. In Java, the class designer can guarantee initialization of every object by providing a constructor. If a class has a constructor, Java automatically calls that constructor when an object is created, before users can even get their hands on it. So initialization is guaranteed.
[Thinking in Java, 107]
