What does a constructor return?

Question

My question is what does a constructor return? This question is not quite different from \"What is the return type of a constructor?\" I have read somewhere that a construct

Answer 1

construct does return something. it returns reference to object that this points to. so the implicit return statement from a constructor looks like

*this;

How is this used?

If you create a class template of something with a "generic" type as member, you call the default zero parameter constructor of the generic type explicitly (i.e., generic() ) in the constructor of your class something and initialize your generic member via the assignment operator and initialization statement of the something constructor. Constructor has to return something or none of that crap I just wrote would work. It's in the book I'm reading...lol.