Back in lesson , we defined an object in C++ as, “a piece of memory that can be used to store values”. An object with a name is called a variable. In traditional programming (what we’ve been doing prior to this point), programs are basically lists of instructions to the …
In lesson , we introduced the concept of naming collisions and namespaces. As a reminder, a naming collision occurs when two identical identifiers are introduced into the same scope, and the compiler can’t disambiguate which one to use. When this happens, compiler or linker will produce an error because they …
A recursive function in C++ is a function that calls itself. Here is an example of a poorly-written recursive function: #include <iostream> void countDown(int count) { std::cout << “push ” << count << ‘\n’; countDown(count-1); // countDown() calls itself recursively } int main() { countDown(5); return 0; } When countDown(5) …
The memory that a program uses is typically divided into a few different areas, called segments: The code segment (also called a text segment), where the compiled program sits in memory. The code segment is typically read-only. The bss segment (also called the uninitialized data segment), where zero-initialized global and …
In lesson , you learned that a pointer is a variable that holds the address of another variable. Function pointers are similar, except that instead of pointing to variables, they point to functions! Consider the following function: int foo() { return 5; } Identifier foo is the function’s name. But …
A is a default value provided for a function parameter. For example: void print(int x, int y=10) // 10 is the default argument { std::cout << “x: ” << x << ‘\n’; std::cout << “y: ” << y << ‘\n’; } When making a function call, the caller can optionally …
Consider the following function: int add(int x, int y) { return x + y; } This trivial function adds two integers and returns an integer result. However, what if we also want a function that can add two floating point numbers? This add() function is not suitable, as any floating …
Consider the case where you need to write some code to perform some discrete task, like reading input from the user, or outputting something to a file, or calculating a particular value. When implementing this code, you essentially have two options: Write the code as part of an existing function …
In prior lessons, we’ve covered two different ways to pass an argument to a function: pass by value () and pass by reference (). Here’s a sample program that shows a std::string object being passed by value and by reference: #include <iostream> #include <string> void printByValue(std::string val) // The function …
In the previous lessons, we introduced lvalue references () and lvalue references to const (). In isolation, these may not have seemed very useful — why create an alias to a variable when you can just use the variable itself? In this lesson, we’ll finally provide some insight into what …
