Chapter1_Programming

Chapter 1: Programming

Lecture notes by: Michael Hahsler

Diagrams for Chapter 1

This chapter is a review of important concepts and their C++ implementation used in this course. Very good short explanations can be found in this C++ YouTube Playlist.

Classes and Compiling

• A simple class called IntCell.
• What does the compiler, the linker, and the loader do?

Dynamic Memory Allocation and Pointers

• Some Questions:

  • Where do programs store variables and objects?
  • Where does memory come from and how is memory returned?
  • What is dynamic memory and why do we need dynamic memory allocation?
  • What is the difference between the stack and the heap.
  • What happens when you access memory that is not yours?

  See program memory, segmentation fault.

• Example: Create a memory diagram for executing the following program:

  int inc(int x) return x + 1;
  
  int main() {
    int a = 10;
    int b = inc(a);
    return 0;
  }

• Video: How do create memory diagrams

• Pointers and dynamic memory allocation

• Call-by-value vs call-by-reference and using const.

• Reading: References vs. pointers

• Exercise: Memory allocation

• What are the differences between memory management in C, C++, Java and Python? (Most programming languages use very similar mechanisms.)

  	C	C++	Java	Python
  Request dynamic memory	?	?	?	?
  Return dynamic memory	?	?	?	?

• Destructor, copy constructor, assignment operator, and move semantics: The rule of three and the big five for classes.

Templates (a.k.a. Generics)

• Function and class templates.

Standard Template Library

Most programming languages come with a library of ready-to-use data structures (abstract data types often called collections) and algorithms to supplement its primitive data types. Java has the Java collections framework including [java.util]. Python has a standard library built into the language.

C++ has the C++ Standard Template Library (STL).

• Reading: The C++ Standard Template Library (STL)
• Examples: Arrays vs STL vectors and C-strings vs STL strings.
• How to compare objects (operator< and function objects)

File IO

• File IO

Command Line Interface

• The command line interface (CLI)

Recursion

• Recursion to calculate factorials.

Testing

All code needs tests! Ways of testing are described in HOWTO Test.

Example: Testing a function to calculate factorials.

License

All code and documents in this repository are provided under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) License.