(h/t to reader Koe for providing the first draft of this lesson!) Looking at a typical function declaration, it is not possible to determine whether a function might throw an exception or not: int doSomething(); // can this function throw an exception or not? In the above example, can the …
Congrats! You made it through another one. The knowledge you gained regarding structs will be useful when we get to C++’s most important topic — classes! A (also called a ) is a custom type that we can create for use in our own programs. The enumerated types and class …
C++ supports two variants of namespaces that are worth at least knowing about. We won’t build on these, so consider this lesson optional for now. An (also called an ) is a namespace that is defined without a name, like so: #include <iostream> namespace // unnamed namespace { void doSomething() …
Each block defines its own scope region. So what happens when we have a variable inside a nested block that has the same name as a variable in an outer block? When this happens, the nested variable “hides” the outer variable in areas where they are both in scope. This …
In some applications, certain symbolic constants may need to be used throughout your code (not just in one location). These can include physics or mathematical constants that don’t change (e.g. pi or Avogadro’s number), or application-specific “tuning” values (e.g. friction or gravity coefficients). Instead of redefining these constants in every …
In the prior lesson (), we discussed how internal linkage limits the use of an identifier to a single file. In this lesson, we’ll explore the concept of external linkage. An identifier with can be seen and used both from the file in which it is defined, and from other …
In lesson , we said, “An identifier’s linkage determines whether other declarations of that name refer to the same object or not”, and we discussed how local variables have no linkage. Global variable and functions identifiers can have either internal linkage or external linkage. We’ll cover the internal linkage case …
Iterating through an array (or other structure) of data is quite a common thing to do in programming. And so far, we’ve covered many different ways to do so: with loops and an index (for-loops and while loops), with pointers and pointer arithmetic, and with range-based for-loops: #include <array> #include …
With many different versions of C++ available (C++98, C++03, C++11, C++14, C++17, C++20, C++23, etc…) how does your compiler know which one to use? Generally, a compiler will pick a standard to default to. Typically the default is not the most recent language standard — many default to C++14, which …
On modern computer architectures, the smallest addressable unit of memory is a byte. Since all objects need to have unique memory addresses, this means objects must be at least one byte in size. For most variable types, this is fine. However, for Boolean values, this is a bit wasteful (pun …
