If you were to ask a veteran programmer for one piece of advice on good programming practices, after some thought, the most likely answer would be, “Avoid global variables!”. And with good reason: global variables are one of the most historically abused concepts in the language. Although they may seem …
In lesson , we introduced local variables, which are variables that are defined inside a function (including function parameters). It turns out that C++ actually doesn’t have a single attribute that defines a variable as being a local variable. Instead, local variables have several different properties that differentiate how these …
Introduction to constants In programming, a constant is a value that may not be changed during the program’s execution. C++ supports two different kinds of constants: Named constants are constant values that are associated with an identifier. These are also sometimes called symbolic constants. Literal constants are constant values that …
A (also called a ) is a collection of project settings that determines how your IDE will build your project. The build configuration typically includes things like what the executable will be named, what directories the IDE will look in for other code and library files, whether to keep or …
Void is the easiest of the data types to explain. Basically, means “no type”! Void is our first example of an incomplete type. An incomplete type is a type that has been declared but not yet defined. The compiler knows about the existence of such types, but does not have …
Local variables Variables defined inside the body of a function are called local variables (as opposed to global variables, which we’ll discuss in a future chapter): int add(int x, int y) { int z{ x + y }; // z is a local variable return z; } Function parameters are …
In the previous lesson, we learned that we could have a function return a value back to the function’s caller. We used that to create a modular getValueFromUser function that we used in this program: #include <iostream> int getValueFromUser() { std::cout << “Enter an integer: “; int input{}; std::cin >> …
In this lesson, we’ll talk more about std::cout, which we used in our Hello world! program to output the text Hello world! to the console. We’ll also explore how to get input from the user, which we will use to make our programs more interactive. The (io library) is part …
What is C++11? On August 12, 2011, the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) approved a new version of C++, called C++11. C++11 adds a whole new set of features to the C++ language! Use of these new features is entirely optional — but you will undoubtedly find some of them …
In the previous lessons on integers, we covered that C++ only guarantees that integer variables will have a minimum size — but they could be larger, depending on the target system. For example, an int has a minimum size of 16-bits, but its typically 32-bits on modern architectures. If you …
