Initialisation and assignment

Question

What EXACTLY is the difference between INITIALIZATION and ASSIGNMENT ?

PS : If possible please give examples in C and C++ , specifically .

Actually , I was

Answer 1

One thing that nobody has yet mentioned is the difference between initialisation and assignment of class fields in the constructor.

Let us consider the class:

class Thing
{
  int num;
  char c;
public:
  Thing();
};

Thing::Thing()
  : num(5)
{
  c = 'a';
}

What we have here is a constructor that initialises Thing::num to the value of 5, and assigns 'a' to Thing::c. In this case the difference is minor, but as was said before if you were to substitute int and char in this example for some arbitrary classes, we would be talking about the difference between calling a parameterised constructor versus a default constructor followed by operator= function.