Multi-Paradigm Programming using C++ -- Preface

• chapter summary
• supplementary materials
• acknowledgements

Many Computer Science programmes teach two programming languages in the first years of the core curriculum. The first language is selected for its simple semantics and ease of use so that students can learn about fundamental computing topics such as control structures, functions, recursion, abstract data types, etc. without bothering about the underlying hardware and operating system aspects. C++ is not a good language for this purpose.

The second language is then chosen to complement the first in that its teaching provides an opportunity to study the aspects that are abstracted from in the first language: efficiency, run-time support including operating system interfaces and memory management, compilation and linking, etc. Choosing an industrially relevant and wide-spectrum language has obvious additional advantages. C++ is an ideal candidate for this purpose as it exposes the student to all of the above aspects while at the same time it provides powerful abstraction mechanisms supporting generic and object-oriented programming.

This textbook presents a concise yet reasonably complete introduction to the C++ programming language and its abstraction mechanisms. The reader is expected to be familiar with basic programming concepts, making this book suitable, for example, for second year computer science students.

C++ is a wide spectrum language that provides a confusing number of features, which I've tried to streamline by providing a hierarchy of concepts centred around the notions of types and type constructors. The structure of the book reflects the gradual introduction of these concepts:

• simple data objects and functions,
• simple built-in types and operations,
• (user-defined) abstract data types,
• built-in type constructors,
• user-defined type constructors, and
• extending types using inheritance.

The text also touches on the implementation of the various concepts. This is necessary to motivate the decisions that have influenced the design of C++, thus making it easier to really understand the language. Moreover, knowing a bit about the implementation is also useful when assessing the efficiency aspects of alternative designs.

Chapter Summary

• Chapter 1 (pp. 1-24) presents the basic concepts of C++: data objects, values, types and variables, references, object construction, functions; basic lexical and syntactic (scope, namespaces) aspects of the language; compilation and linking.
• Chapter 2 (pp. 25-36) covers built-in types and associated operators; it also introduces conversions and operator overloading.
• Functions are covered in Chapter 3 (pp. 37-50): control flow, local and static data objects, overloading.
• Chapter 4 (pp. 51-82) introduces user-defined types, concentrating on the class construct as a suitable mechanism for abstract data type programming.
• Pointers, constant objects and arrays are presented as built-in type constructors (i.e. functions that map types to types) in Chapter 5 (pp. 83-116). A taxonomy of object memory management alternatives is also presented.
• Chapter 6 (pp. 117-136) presents templates as user-defined type constructors. Template argument deduction, overloading and specialization are also covered.
• Generic programming using abstractions such as iterators is covered in Chapter 7 (pp. 137-182). The chapter includes an overview of several standard library containers, algorithms and adaptors.
• Chapter 8 (pp. 183-204) deals with derivation as a mechanism to support subtypes, polymorphism and object-oriented programming.
• Chapter 9 (pp. 205-216) covers exceptions.
• Chapter 10 (pp. 217-240) presents the iostream library, including its design and how to implement new stream classes.
• Chapter 11 (pp. 241-264) motivates and describes good design practices: developing coherent abstractions that are independent and reusable.

Supplementary Materials

The site also contains a set of transparencies and a list of errata.

Acknowledgements