It’s very unfortunate that you see dynamic allocation so often. That just shows how many bad C++ programmers there are. In a sense, you have two questions bundled up into one. The first is when should we use dynamic allocation (using new)? The second is when should we use pointers? The important take-home message is … Read more
Strongly typed enums aiming to solve multiple problems and not only scoping problem as you mentioned in your question: Provide type safety, thus eliminating implicit conversion to integer by integral promotion. Specify underlying types. Provide strong scoping. Thus, it is impossible to implicitly convert a strongly typed enum to integers, or even its underlying type … Read more
How well does the C++ standard library support unicode? Terribly. A quick scan through the library facilities that might provide Unicode support gives me this list: Strings library Localization library Input/output library Regular expressions library I think all but the first one provide terrible support. I’ll get back to it in more detail after a … Read more
Options one and two are just wrong. The first one uses the size of a pointer instead of the size of the array, so it probably won’t write to the whole array. The second uses sizeof(char*) instead of sizeof(char) so it will write past the end of the array. Option 3 is okay. You could also use this but sizeof(char) is … Read more
Within any non-static member function, this points to the object that the function was called on. It’s safe to use as long as that’s a valid object. Within the body of a constructor or destructor, there is a valid object of the class currently being constructed. However, if this is the base sub-object of some … Read more
You don’t need initialization lists for that:
The special thing about iterators is that they provide the glue between algorithms and containers. For generic code, the recommendation would be to use a combination of STL algorithms (e.g. find, sort, remove, copy) etc. that carries out the computation that you have in mind on your data structure (vector, list, map etc.), and to supply that algorithm with iterators into your container. … Read more
In C#, there is a nice syntax sugar for fields with getter and setter. Moreover, I like the auto-implemented properties which allow me to write In C++ I have to write Is there some such concept in the C++11 allowing me to have some syntax sugar on this?
The error message from the compiler is very clear. getInput is a non-static member function of the class. You need an object of the class to be able to use that member function. Instead of use Another solution. Since the class does not have any member variables, you may change getInput to a static member functions. If you do that, you … Read more
The auto keyword is simply asking the compiler to deduce the type of the variable from the initialization. Even a pre-C++0x compiler knows what the type of an (initialization) expression is, and more often than not, you can see that type in error messages. The auto keyword simply allows you to take advantage of this … Read more