object-oriented programming with ANSI c

Object-oriented programming is the current cure-all — although it has been around for much more then ten years. At the core, there is little more to it then finally applying the good programming principles which we have been taught for more then twenty years. C++ (Eiffel, Oberon-2, Smalltalk ... take your pick) is the New Language because it is object-oriented — although you need not use it that way if you do not want to (or know how to), and it turns out that you can do just as well with plain ANSI-C. Only object-orientation permits code reuse between pro- jects — although the idea of subroutines is as old as computers and good program- mers always carried their toolkits and libraries with them. This book is not going to praise object-oriented programming or condemn the Old Way. We are simply going to use ANSI-C to discover how object-oriented pro- gramming is done, what its techniques are, why they help us solve bigger prob- lems, and how we harness generality and program to catch mistakes earlier. Along the way we encounter all the jargon — classes, inheritance, instances, linkage, methods, objects, polymorphisms, and more — but we take it out of the realm of magic and see how it translates into the things we have known and done all along. I had fun discovering that ANSI-C is a full-scale object-oriented language. To share this fun you need to be reasonably fluent in ANSI-C to begin with — feeling comfortable with structures, pointers, prototypes, and function pointers is a must. Working through the book you will encounter all the newspeak — according to Orwell and Webster a language ‘‘designed to diminish the range of thought’’ — and I will try to demonstrate how it merely combines all the good programming princi- ples that you always wanted to employ into a coherent approach. As a result, you may well become a more proficient ANSI-C programmer. The first six chapters develop the foundations of object-oriented programming with ANSI-C. We start with a careful information hiding technique for abstract data types, add generic functions based on dynamic linkage and inherit code by judicious lengthening of structures. Finally, we put it all together in a class hierarchy that makes code much easier to maintain. Programming takes discipline. Good programming takes a lot of discipline, a large number of principles, and standard, defensive ways of doing things right. Pro- grammers use tools. Good programmers make tools to dispose of routine tasks once and for all. Object-oriented programming with ANSI-C requires a fair amount of immutable code — names may change but not the structures. Therefore, in chapter seven we build a small preprocessor to create the boilerplate required. It looks like yet another new object-oriented dialect language (yanoodl perhaps?) but it should not be viewed as such — it gets the dull parts out of the way and lets us concentrate on the creative aspects of problem solving with better techniques. ooc