UPDATE This answer is rather old, and so describes what was ‘good’ at the time, which was smart pointers provided by the Boost library. Since C++11, the standard library has provided sufficient smart pointers types, and so you should favour the use of std::unique_ptr, std::shared_ptr and std::weak_ptr. There was also std::auto_ptr. It was very much … Read more
In C++, there are three distinct character types: char signed char unsigned char If you are using character types for text, use the unqualified char: it is the type of character literals like ‘a’ or ‘0’ (in C++ only, in C their type is int) it is the type that makes up C strings like … Read more
Is there any reason I don’t see this in C++? Is it bad practice? No. It is not a bad practice, but the following approach renders your code certain flexibility. Usually, pre-C++11 the code for iterating over container elements uses iterators, something like: This is because it makes the code more flexible. All standard library … Read more
I’m very new to C++, and I was wondering if there was a way to make a min heap in C++ from the standard library.
will try to initialise the array by calling a default constructor for node. You could either provide a default constructor or, rather verbosely, initialise all 100 elements explicitly or, since you’re using C++, use std::vector instead, appending to it (using push_back) at runtime
argv and argc are how command line arguments are passed to main() in C and C++. argc will be the number of strings pointed to by argv. This will (in practice) be 1 plus the number of arguments, as virtually all implementations will prepend the name of the program to the array. The variables are … Read more
static_cast `static_cast` is used for cases where you basically want to reverse an implicit conversion, with a few restrictions and additions. `static_cast` performs no runtime checks. This should be used if you know that you refer to an object of a specific type, and thus a check would be unnecessary. Example: In this example, you … Read more
A “const function”, denoted with the keyword const after a function declaration, makes it a compiler error for this class function to change a member variable of the class. However, reading of a class variables is okay inside of the function, but writing inside of this function will generate a compiler error. Another way of … Read more
Reviewing the basic terminology It’s usually good enough – unless you’re programming assembly – to envisage a pointer containing a numeric memory address, with 1 referring to the second byte in the process’s memory, 2 the third, 3 the fourth and so on…. What happened to 0 and the first byte? Well, we’ll get to … Read more
Is there any reason I don’t see this in C++? Is it bad practice? No. It is not a bad practice, but the following approach renders your code certain flexibility. Usually, pre-C++11 the code for iterating over container elements uses iterators, something like: This is because it makes the code more flexible. All standard library … Read more