Re: Why can one invoke setters and getters from a (class) constructor?

From:

Lew <noone@lewscanon.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.help

Date:

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 22:37:26 -0400

Message-ID:

<ip02ct$imj$1@news.albasani.net>

Joshua Cranmer wrote:

Longer answer:
So, the initialization of memory happens pretty much at the point you type in
"new" (or the equivalent newInstance statement when doing reflection). This
causes all of the local variables to be default-initialized to 0. Immediately

^^^^^
This causes all of the instance member variables to be default-initialized to
0-equivalent values.

thereafter (unless someone is playing with bytecode), the appropriate
constructor is called, which then immediately (again, unless someone is playing with bytecode)

calls any 'this()' constructor invocations, if they exist, until it hits a
constructor that does not start with a 'this()' invocation, then it

calls the superclass's constructor, etc., until it
reaches Object. At that point, the calls start to unwind. Note that subclasses
do not get a chance to really run until after their superclass does, so
although it is possible to call overridable instance methods, it is not
recommended to do so because said instance method might expect more
initialization than is the case. If you do do this, make sure that you
emphasize this in documentation so implementors at least know that they need
to be prepared for this case.

--
Lew
Honi soit qui mal y pense.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Friz.jpg