Question

newbie here, in order to help sort out problems in my C++ project, I am compiling with the -Weffc++ option in g++.

It’s giving me hundreds of warnings about “warning … should be initialized in the member initialization list”

Is this really necessary seeing as it will a) take a bit of time to write them all in, and b) make make things messier when I was happy initialising variables when they are need only.

But more specifically, how do I initialise a std::vector?

Is this the way, ie just putting a 0 in brackets?
My header:

class Blade;
class Postpro {
   public:
     Postpro(string fName) : theFileName(fName),
                             blade(NULL),
                             sizes(10),
                             t(std::vector<double>(0){};
     ~Postpro(){};
     void test();

   private:
     string theFileName;
     Blade* blade;
     int sizes;
     std::vector<double> t;
}

And then in the cpp I just resize the vector if I want to use it?

void Postpro::test() {
    blade = new Blade;
    t.resize(37);
}

Thanks

Answer 1

You can do this the way you did it, but there is no point — the default constructor does exactly the same job. It is better to use initializer lists, but if it leads to unreadable or unnecessarily complicated code, it’s perfectly fine to initialize (to be more precise, reset them from their default values) the member variables in the constructor body.