In my daily life and while reading books I've seen the term destructor as well as deconstructor.
But what is the correct name for this method?
7 Answers
"Destructor" is indeed the correct term. I have seen "deconstructor" in older books, and it appears that there was debate for a while over the correct term, but destructor appears to have won out.
As for the flippant answers about what wiki or WoW says about deconstruction: try looking up "destructor" in a standard dictionary. Apparently, it's a device for destroying an off-course airborne missile or launch vehicle.
Destruct = Destroy
Deconstruct = Decompose (Reverse compose into pieces)
Put -tor then it's the executer of the verb. So it's depend on the context you trying to achieve.
I still remember the lecture that introduced concepts in Haskell when I first heard of the word "deconstructor". I first was confused because I thought of destructors but as it quickly turned out, they are different concepts. Haskell has no destructors but deconstructors. They are used to retrieve single data member fields that a structured value contains. They are basically member accessors but as functions.
I actually wondered about the word because I practically never found it elsewhere. Here I found an answer:
Decomposer oder destructuring could be a good equivalent term and "destructuring" really is something that I commonly have heard of.
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