C++ Essentials
Since its introduction less than a decade ago, C++ has experienced growing acceptance as a practical object-oriented programming language suitable for teaching, research, and commercial software development. The language has also rapidly evolved during this period and acquired a number of new features (e.g., templates and exception handling) which have added to its richness. This book serves as an introduction to the C++ language. It teaches how to program in C++ and how to properly use its features. It does not attempt to teach object-oriented design to any depth, which I believe is best covered in a book in its own right.
In designing this book, I have strived to achieve three goals. First, to produce a concise introductory text, free from unnecessary verbosity, so that beginners can develop a good understanding of the language in a short period of time. Second, I have tried to combine a tutorial style (based on explanation of concepts through examples) with a reference style (based on a flat structure). As a result, each chapter consists of a list of relatively short sections (mostly one or two pages), with no further subdivision. This, I hope, further simplifies the reader’s task. Finally, I have consciously avoided trying to present an absolutely complete description of C++. While no important topic has been omitted, descriptions of some of the minor idiosyncrasies have been avoided for the sake of clarity and to avoid overwhelming beginners with too much information. Experience suggests that any small knowledge gaps left as a result, will be easily filled over time through selfdiscovery.
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An algorithm is expressed in abstract terms. To be intelligible to a computer, it needs to be expressed in a language understood by it. The only language really understood by a computer is its own machine language. Programs expressed in the machine language are said to be executable. A program written in any other language needs to be first translated to the machine language before it can be executed.
A machine language is far too cryptic to be suitable for the direct use of programmers. A further abstraction of this language is the assembly language which provides mnemonic names for the instructions and a more intelligible notation for the data. An assembly language program is translated to machine language by a translator called an assembler.
Even assembly languages are difficult to work with. High-level languages such as C++ provide a much more convenient notation for implementing algorithms. They liberate programmers from having to think in very low-level terms, and help them to focus on the algorithm instead. A program written in a high-level language is translated to assembly language by a translator called a compiler. The assembly code produced by the compiler is then assembled to produce an executable program.
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A character variable is defined to be of type char. A character variable occupies a single byte which contains the code for the character. This code is a numeric value and depends on the character coding system being used (i.e., is machine-dependent). The most common system is ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). For example, the character A has the ASCII code 65, and the character a has the ASCII code 97.
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Website: www.pragsoft.com | Filesize: 540kb
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Tags: abstract class, basic, exception handling, file I/O, file manipulations, information hiding, inheritance, Object Oriented, overloading, polymorphism, Preprocessor
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