Please Help

[bobr]

I am new to programing and I am in my first programing class. My teacher recently spoke about what he called the big 3. THE BIG 3: overloaded Assignment operator, Destructor, and the Copy Constructor. Can someone explain to me what they are, what they do, and show me an example????

[vlad from moscow]

I have looked through the C++ Standard and I have not found out any reference to "THE BIG 3".:) And why "THE BIG 3" and not "THE BIG 4" that includes a constructor at least the default constructor?:)

[Chriscpp]

@bobr ask your teacher hmmm so simple ;)

[keskiverto]

http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/classes/
http://www.cplusplus.com/articles/y8hv0pDG/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4172722/what-is-the-rule-of-three

[zb0S216C]

"The Big Three", or more commonly known as "The Rule of Three", is a programming idiom and not in/directly part of the C++ standard.

The idiom pretty much means this:

If you have to overload either the assignment operator, copy-constructor or destructor, then it's very likely that the remaining two also need overloading. More detail on this subject can be found on StackOverflow^[1] and Wikipedia^[2].

^[1]http://stackoverflow.com/a/4172724
^[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(C%2B%2B_programming)

_Wazzak