Miscellaneous things about C++

 Developed by Bjarne Stroustrup in the mid 1980s, C++ was meant to be object-oriented, but it also sat on top of C, which was developed in the early 1970s. That means all C code would compile using a C++ compiler. This is not entirely true, but most C programs will compile using a C++ compiler.

Some of C++ is cryptic because of acquiring its basics from C. C was developed in the 1970s and as you can imagine, priorities and issues were different then. C was designed to be small and fast. A basic philosophy of C is to compile correct programs quickly. And you will find that it will try to compile most any code that you write and will not give error messages for programmer errors. For example, if you access an element out of bounds of an array, you will not get an error. Your program may crash depending on what the subscript value is, but it will generally not complain. Thus, pay close attention to warnings as most modern compilers try to help you out.

In C++, it is common to separate the interface from the implementation. There are header files, which use extension .h (the interface) as well as .cpp files holding code (the implementation). Typically .h files hold function prototypes or class definitions and the .cpp file will hold the actual function or the bodies of class functions or methods.

File names for C++ programs don't have to be the same as class names. Typically though, if not named the same, most people name then something similar. For example, an example we will look at is a class wrapper for int arrays, called Array, so we the programmer can do error checking. The file names used are array.h and array.cpp. As with all good coding, use meaningful names.

C++ has both local and global everything. In Java, everything is local to some unit. You have local declarations in classes and local declarations in methods. This means you can only use the identifier in that scope.

In C++ you can define things globally. This means that anything defined globally can be used anywhere in the entire program. As you might guess, this can be very dangerous as anything defined globally can be changed by any unit, in any function defined anywhere. For this reason, you should almost never define things globally. A few exceptions include const definitions and some type definitions. Technically class definitions are global as they are not found in the scope of another unit.