Week 7 - Monday, October 2, 2006 to Friday, October 6, 2006

The Big Three and Overloaded Operators

Comments

     We revisit Constructors this week with more depth.  The "Big Three" are the Copy Constructor, the operator= assignment operator, and the Destructor.  To prevent problems you should define all three for any class that needs any of them.  In addition, the Default Constructor should be considered the "Big Fourth", unless you specifically don't want one.

    Overloaded Operators are a controversial feature of C++.  They are a syntactic convenience, and really are not needed for anything but pretty code.  However, they are popular in certain types of C++ classes that mimic the operators of normal C syntax.  They are used by the standard libraries of C++.  For instance, the <string> class uses overloaded operators to allow you to write:

string hello = "Hello World?";

hello[11] = '!';

A lot of programming language theorists think they are unnecessary, however, and complicate a language a lot for the little improvement in the ease of use.  Java did not include overloaded operators, but Microsoft put them back in for C#.

Don't try to learn all the details of overloaded operators!   It isn't worth it.  Just learn the overall concepts and then use my files StandardFunctions.h and StandardFunctions.cpp to actually create your new classes.  If you deviate just a little from the code in these files, overloaded functions don't work well and give all kinds of strange errors.  Keep very, very close to the code and the instructions in the comments of these two files.  Delete any functions you don't want for your class.   You can, of course, add additional functions that are not related to Constructors or Overloaded Operators.

Course Content

    Week 7
    The Big Three
    Overloaded Operators

Readings

Deitel and Deitel Fifth Edition, ??.

Deitel and Deitel Fourth Edition, ??

Lab Assignment

    Lab 7
 

Week 7 Test

    12 Questions for 4 points, with fractions rounded up.

    Only available Friday, October 6th, from 6:00 am to 3:00 am Saturday morning on Angel.  It will cover the following material:   

• Conceptual questions or questions about code, all based on material covered in the Week 7 Course Content,  The Big Three and Overloaded Operators.  Questions from the Deitel & Deitel readings covering The Big Three and default constructors may be included, but they will not be a major part of the test, and will not test details of the text, just the larger concepts.  The Deitel readings on overloaded operators will not be included on the test.