I appreciate the replies. The reason I ask this is because I came across the following reply in another thread somewhere discussing some code on an Arduino which seemed consistent with several example sketches I have been looking at.
Finally you have to change the direct calls (e.g .SwitchStateChanged()) to indirect (so ->SwitchStateChanged()). This is the standard way to handle objects.
In light of these replies, it would seem that the above quote was from someone that was offering more general programming advice, but specifically for most AVR applications it is sufficient to statically instantiate a class due to memory allocation constraints.
However, is there any drawback to using "new" to instantiate an object when setting up the environment (basically, just once within setup()) and then leaving it be and never deleting or creating new instances of the class after that?
Yes. And you wouldn't have needed to ask this question if you had just written a little test sketch to try it out.
Or, I could throw an additional, somewhat-related, simple yes-or-no question behind the primary topic question and get a quick, easy, yes-or-no answer from friendly and helpful people such as yourself that were kind enough to reply.
Much appreciated.