Static Keyword in C, C++, C#, and Java – Differences Explained

re your #2: Actually, making functions non-members often increases encapsulation, as Scott Meyers observed more than a decade ago.

Anyway, what you describe sounds much like C#'s extension methods to me. They are good to soothe the minds of those that are frightened when they see totally free functions. :) Once you've braved the STL (which, BTW, is not the standard library, but only that part of it which comes from the original STL) where almost all functions are so free that they aren't even real functions, but function templates, you will no longer need those.

In short: Don't try to bend a language to adapt to your mindset. Instead enhance your mindset to embrace the language's philosophy. You will emerge a bit taller from doing so.

Your observations are correct. C++ is a complicated beast, and the new keyword was used to distinguish between something that needed delete later and something that would be automatically reclaimed. In Java and C#, they dropped the delete keyword because the garbage collector would take care of it for you.

The problem then is why did they keep the new keyword? Without talking to the people who wrote the language it's kind of difficult to answer. My best guesses are listed below:

• It was semantically correct. If you were familiar with C++, you knew that the new keyword creates an object on the heap. So, why change expected behavior?
• It calls attention to the fact that you are instantiating an object rather than calling a method. With Microsoft code style recommendations, method names start with capital letters so there can be confusion.

Ruby is somewhere in between Python and Java/C# in it's use of new. Basically you instantiate an object like this:

f = Foo.new()

It's not a keyword, it's a static method for the class. What that means is that if you want a singleton, you can override the default implementation of new() to return the same instance every time. It's not necessarily recommended, but it's possible.