C++ Programming

static data member

The use of the static specifier in a data member, will cause that member to be shared by all instances of the owner class and derived classes. To use static data members you must declare the data member as static and initialize it outside of the class declaration, at file scope.

When used in a class data member, all instantiations of that class share one copy of the variable.

class Foo {
public:
  Foo() {
    ++iNumFoos;
    cout << "We have now created " << iNumFoos << " instances of the Foo class\n";
  }
private:
  static int iNumFoos;
};

int Foo::iNumFoos = 0;  // allocate memory for numFoos, and initialize it

int main() {
  Foo f1;
  Foo f2;
  Foo f3;
}

In the example above, the static class variable numFoos is shared between all three instances of the Foo class (f1, f2 and f3) and keeps a count of the number of times that the Foo class has been instantiated.