Tinking in C++(TXT)

This appendix is not about indenting and placement of parentheses and curly braces, although that will be mentioned. It is about the general guidelines used in this book for organizing the code listings. Although many of these issues have been introduced throughout the book, this appendix appears at the end so it can be assumed that every topic is fair game, and if you don&#8217;t understand something you can look it up in the appropriate section. All the decisions about coding style in this book have been deliberately considered and made, sometimes over a period of years. Of course, everyone has their reasons for organizing code the way they do, and I&#8217;m just trying to tell you how I arrived at mine and the constraints and environmental factors that brought me to those decisions. General In the text of this book, identifiers (function, variable, and class names) are set in bold. Most keywords will also be set in bold, except for those keywords that are used so much that the bolding can become tedious, such as &#8220;class&#8221; and &#8220;virtual.&#8221; I use a particular coding style for the examples in this book. It was developed over a number of years, and was partially inspired by Bjarne Stroustrup&#8217;s style in his original The C++ Programming Language.[64] The subject of formatting style is good for hours of hot debate, so I&#8217;ll just say I&#8217;m not trying to dictate correct style via my examples; I have my own motivation for using the style that I do. Because C++ is a free-form programming language, you can continue to use whatever style you&#8217;re comfortable with. That said, I will note that it is important to have a consistent formatting style within a project. If you search the Internet, you will find a number of tools that can be used to reformat all the code in your project to achieve this valuable consistency. The programs in this book are files that are automatically extracted from the text of the book, which allows them to be tested to ensure that they work correctly. Thus, the code files printed in the book should all work without compile-time errors when compiled with an implementation that conforms to Standard C++ (note that not all compilers support all language features). The errors that should cause compile-time error messages are commented out with the comment //! so they can be easily discovered and tested using automatic means. Errors discovered and reported to the author will appear first in the electronic version of the book (at www.BruceEckel.com) and later in updates of the book. One of the standards in this book is that all programs will compile and link without errors (although they will sometimes cause warnings). To this end, some of the programs, which demonstrate only a coding example and don&#8217;t represent stand-alone programs, will have empty main(&#160;) functions, like this int main() {} This allows the linker to complete without an error. The standard for main(&#160;) is to return an int, but Standard C++ states that if there is no return statement inside main(&#160;), the compiler will automatically generate code to return 0. This option (no return statement in main(&#160;)) will be used in this book (some compilers may still generate warnings for this, but those are not compliant with Standard C++). File names In C, it has been traditional to name header files (containing declarations) with an extension of .h and implementation files (that cause storage to be allocated and code to be generated) with an extension of .c. C++ went through an evolution. It was first developed on Unix, where the operating system was aware of upper and lower case in file names. The original file names were simply capitalized versions of the C extensions: .H and .C. This of course didn&#8217;t work for operating systems that didn&#8217;t distinguish upper and lower case, such as DOS. DOS C++ vendors used extensions of hxx and cxx for header files and implementation files, respectively, or hpp and cpp. Later, someone figured out that the only reason you needed a different extension for a file was so the compiler could determine whether to compile it as a C or C++ file. Because the compiler never compiled header files directly, only the implementation file extension needed to be changed. The custom, across virtually all systems, has now become to use cpp for implementation files and h for header files. Note that when including Standard C++ header files, the option of having no file name extension is used, i.e.: #include <iostream>. Begin and end comment tags