Java's implicit constructor invocation

I learned an interesting Java tidbit today that I'm surprised I never ran across before. It turns out that all object constructors implicitly call the superclass' no argument constructor. Quoting from Section 8.8.5 of the Java Language Specification:

If a constructor body does not begin with an explicit constructor invocation and the constructor being declared is not part of the primordial class Object, then the constructor body is implicitly assumed by the compiler to begin with a superclass constructor invocation "super();", an invocation of the constructor of its direct superclass that takes no arguments.

This, in a sense, provides constructor inheritance, and ensures that some form of the parent's constructor gets called be it explicitly or implicitly. For some reason I thought that a parent's constructor was invoked only if called explicitly. I'm fairly certain this is the way C++ works. But now I will have to write a little test code to verify this. I actually like the implicit super() behavior, and now that I know about it, I'm sure it'll be useful at some point.