Please tell me why the constructor does not return any value. I want a perfect technical reason to explain to my students why the constructor does not have any return type.
19 Answers
Constructor doesn’t return anything not even Void. Though some of the answers have mentioned that Constructor do return reference to the newly created object , which is not true. It’s the new operator that returns the object.
So Why constructor doesn’t return any value
Because its not supposed to return anything. The whole purpose of constructor is to initialize the current state of the object by setting the initial values.
So Why doesn’t it even return Void
This is actually a Design constraint which has been placed to distinguish it from methods. public void className() is perfectly legal in java but it denotes a method and not a constructor. To make the compiler understand that it’s a constructor , it requires a way to distinguish it.
A method returns the value to its caller method, when called explicitly. Since, a constructor is not called explicitly, who will it return the value to. The sole purpose of a constructor is to initialize the member variables of a class.
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