You now know almost enough of the basics to create and compile a program. The program will use the Standard C++ iostream classes. These read from and write to files and “standard” input and output (which normally comes from and goes to the console, but may be redirected to files or devices). In this simple program, a stream object will be used to print a message on the screen.

To declare the functions and external data in the iostreams class, include the header file with the statement

The first program uses the concept of standard output, which means “a general-purpose place to send output.” You will see other examples using standard output in different ways, but here it will just go to the console. The iostream package automatically defines a variable (an object) called cout that accepts all data bound for standard output.

To send data to standard output, you use the operator <<. C programmers know this operator as the “bitwise left shift,” which will be described in the next chapter. Suffice it to say that a bitwise left shift has nothing to do with output. However, C++ allows operators to be overloaded. When you overload an operator, you give it a new meaning when that operator is used with an object of a particular type. With iostream objects, the operator << means “send to.” For example:

sends the string “howdy!” to the object called cout (which is short for “console output”).

That’s enough operator overloading to get you started. Chapter 12 covers operator overloading in detail.

As mentioned in Chapter 1, one of the problems encountered in the C language is that you “run out of names” for functions and identifiers when your programs reach a certain size. Of course, you don’t really run out of names; it does, however, become harder to think of new ones after awhile. More importantly, when a program reaches a certain size it’s typically broken up into pieces, each of which is built and maintained by a different person or group. Since C effectively has a single arena where all the identifier and function names live, this means that all the developers must be careful not to accidentally use the same names in situations where they can conflict. This rapidly becomes tedious, time-wasting, and, ultimately, expensive.

Standard C++ has a mechanism to prevent this collision: the namespace keyword. Each set of C++ definitions in a library or program is “wrapped” in a namespace, and if some other definition has an identical name, but is in a different namespace, then there is no collision.

Namespaces are a convenient and helpful tool, but their presence means that you must be aware of them before you can write any programs. If you simply include a header file and use some functions or objects from that header, you’ll probably get strange-sounding errors when you try to compile the program, to the effect that the compiler cannot find any of the declarations for the items that you just included in the header file! After you see this message a few times you’ll become familiar with its meaning (which is “You included the header file but all the declarations are within a namespace and you didn’t tell the compiler that you wanted to use the declarations in that namespace”).

There’s a keyword that allows you to say “I want to use the declarations and/or definitions in this namespace.” This keyword, appropriately enough, is using. All of the Standard C++ libraries are wrapped in a single namespace, which is std (for “standard”). As this book uses the standard libraries almost exclusively, you’ll see the following using directive in almost every program:

This means that you want to expose all the elements from the namespace called std. After this statement, you don’t have to worry that your particular library component is inside a namespace, since the using directive makes that namespace available throughout the file where the using directive was written.

Exposing all the elements from a namespace after someone has gone to the trouble to hide them may seem a bit counterproductive, and in fact you should be careful about thoughtlessly doing this (as you’ll learn later in the book). However, the using directive exposes only those names for the current file, so it is not quite as drastic as it first sounds. (But think twice about doing it in a header file – that is reckless.)

There’s a relationship between namespaces and the way header files are included. Before the modern header file inclusion was standardized (without the trailing ‘.h’, as in <iostream>), the typical way to include a header file was with the ‘.h’, such as <iostream.h>. At that time, namespaces were not part of the language either. So to provide backward compatibility with existing code, if you say

it means

However, in this book the standard include format will be used (without the ‘.h’) and so the using directive must be explicit.

For now, that’s all you need to know about namespaces, but in Chapter 10 the subject is covered much more thoroughly.

A C or C++ program is a collection of variables, function definitions, and function calls. When the program starts, it executes initialization code and calls a special function, “main( ).” You put the primary code for the program here.

As mentioned earlier, a function definition consists of a return type (which must be specified in C++), a function name, an argument list in parentheses, and the function code contained in braces. Here is a sample function definition:

The function above has an empty argument list and a body that contains only a comment.

There can be many sets of braces within a function definition, but there must always be at least one set surrounding the function body. Since main( ) is a function, it must follow these rules. In C++, main( ) always has return type of int.

C and C++ are free form languages. With few exceptions, the compiler ignores newlines and white space, so it must have some way to determine the end of a statement. Statements are delimited by semicolons.

C comments start with /* and end with */. They can include newlines. C++ uses C-style comments and has an additional type of comment: //. The // starts a comment that terminates with a newline. It is more convenient than /* */ for one-line comments, and is used extensively in this book.

And now, finally, the first program:

The cout object is handed a series of arguments via the ‘<<’ operators. It prints out these arguments in left-to-right order. The special iostream function endl outputs the line and a newline. With iostreams, you can string together a series of arguments like this, which makes the class easy to use.

In C, text inside double quotes is traditionally called a “string.” However, the Standard C++ library has a powerful class called string for manipulating text, and so I shall use the more precise term character array for text inside double quotes.

The compiler creates storage for character arrays and stores the ASCII equivalent for each character in this storage. The compiler automatically terminates this array of characters with an extra piece of storage containing the value 0 to indicate the end of the character array.

Inside a character array, you can insert special characters by using escape sequences. These consist of a backslash (\) followed by a special code. For example \n means newline. Your compiler manual or local C guide gives a complete set of escape sequences; others include \t (tab), \\ (backslash), and \b (backspace).

Notice that the statement can continue over multiple lines, and that the entire statement terminates with a semicolon

Character array arguments and constant numbers are mixed together in the above cout statement. Because the operator << is overloaded with a variety of meanings when used with cout, you can send cout a variety of different arguments and it will “figure out what to do with the message.”

Throughout this book you’ll notice that the first line of each file will be a comment that starts with the characters that start a comment (typically //), followed by a colon, and the last line of the listing will end with a comment followed by ‘/:~’. This is a technique I use to allow easy extraction of information from code files (the program to do this can be found in volume two of this book, at www.BruceEckel.com). The first line also has the name and location of the file, so it can be referred to in text and in other files, and so you can easily locate it in the source code for this book (which is downloadable from www.BruceEckel.com).

After downloading and unpacking the book’s source code, find the program in the subdirectory CO2. Invoke the compiler with Hello.cpp as the argument. For simple, one-file programs like this one, most compilers will take you all the way through the process. For example, to use the GNU C++ compiler (which is freely available on the Internet), you write:

Other compilers will have a similar syntax; consult your compiler’s documentation for details.

So far you have seen only the most rudimentary aspect of the iostreams class. The output formatting available with iostreams also includes features such as number formatting in decimal, octal, and hexadecimal. Here’s another example of the use of iostreams:

This example shows the iostreams class printing numbers in decimal, octal, and hexadecimal using iostream manipulators (which don’t print anything, but change the state of the output stream). The formatting of floating-point numbers is determined automatically by the compiler. In addition, any character can be sent to a stream object using a cast to a char (a char is a data type that holds single characters). This cast looks like a function call: char( ), along with the character’s ASCII value. In the program above, the char(27) sends an “escape” to cout.

An important feature of the C preprocessor is character array concatenation. This feature is used in some of the examples in this book. If two quoted character arrays are adjacent, and no punctuation is between them, the compiler will paste the character arrays together into a single character array. This is particularly useful when code listings have width restrictions:

At first, the code above can look like an error because there’s no familiar semicolon at the end of each line. Remember that C and C++ are free-form languages, and although you’ll usually see a semicolon at the end of each line, the actual requirement is for a semicolon at the end of each statement, and it’s possible for a statement to continue over several lines.

The iostreams classes provide the ability to read input. The object used for standard input is cin (for “console input”). cin normally expects input from the console, but this input can be redirected from other sources. An example of redirection is shown later in this chapter.

The iostreams operator used with cin is >>. This operator waits for the same kind of input as its argument. For example, if you give it an integer argument, it waits for an integer from the console. Here’s an example:

This program converts a number typed in by the user into octal and hexadecimal representations.

While the typical way to use a program that reads from standard input and writes to standard output is within a Unix shell script or DOS batch file, any program can be called from inside a C or C++ program using the Standard C system( ) function, which is declared in the header file <cstdlib>:

To use the system( ) function, you give it a character array that you would normally type at the operating system command prompt. This can also include command-line arguments, and the character array can be one that you fabricate at run time (instead of just using a static character array as shown above). The command executes and control returns to the program.

This program shows you how easy it is to use plain C library functions in C++; just include the header file and call the function. This upward compatibility from C to C++ is a big advantage if you are learning the language starting from a background in C.

While a character array can be fairly useful, it is quite limited. It’s simply a group of characters in memory, but if you want to do anything with it you must manage all the little details. For example, the size of a quoted character array is fixed at compile time. If you have a character array and you want to add some more characters to it, you’ll need to understand quite a lot (including dynamic memory management, character array copying, and concatenation) before you can get your wish. This is exactly the kind of thing we’d like to have an object do for us.

The Standard C++ string class is designed to take care of (and hide) all the low-level manipulations of character arrays that were previously required of the C programmer. These manipulations have been a constant source of time-wasting and errors since the inception of the C language. So, although an entire chapter is devoted to the string class in Volume 2 of this book, the string is so important and it makes life so much easier that it will be introduced here and used in much of the early part of the book.

To use strings you include the C++ header file <string>. The string class is in the namespace std so a using directive is necessary. Because of operator overloading, the syntax for using strings is quite intuitive:

The first two strings, s1 and s2, start out empty, while s3 and s4 show two equivalent ways to initialize string objects from character arrays (you can just as easily initialize string objects from other string objects).

You can assign to any string object using ‘=’. This replaces the previous contents of the string with whatever is on the right-hand side, and you don’t have to worry about what happens to the previous contents – that’s handled automatically for you. To combine strings you simply use the ‘+’ operator, which also allows you to combine character arrays with strings. If you want to append either a string or a character array to another string, you can use the operator ‘+=’. Finally, note that iostreams already know what to do with strings, so you can just send a string (or an expression that produces a string, which happens with s1 + s2 + "!") directly to cout in order to print it.

In C, the process of opening and manipulating files requires a lot of language background to prepare you for the complexity of the operations. However, the C++ iostream library provides a simple way to manipulate files, and so this functionality can be introduced much earlier than it would be in C.

To open files for reading and writing, you must include <fstream>. Although this will automatically include <iostream>, it’s generally prudent to explicitly include <iostream> if you’re planning to use cin, cout, etc.

To open a file for reading, you create an ifstream object, which then behaves like cin. To open a file for writing, you create an ofstream object, which then behaves like cout. Once you’ve opened the file, you can read from it or write to it just as you would with any other iostream object. It’s that simple (which is, of course, the whole point).

One of the most useful functions in the iostream library is getline( ), which allows you to read one line (terminated by a newline) into a string object[28]. The first argument is the ifstream object you’re reading from and the second argument is the string object. When the function call is finished, the string object will contain the line.

Here’s a simple example, which copies the contents of one file into another:

To open the files, you just hand the ifstream and ofstream objects the file names you want to create, as seen above.

There is a new concept introduced here, which is the while loop. Although this will be explained in detail in the next chapter, the basic idea is that the expression in parentheses following the while controls the execution of the subsequent statement (which can also be multiple statements, wrapped inside curly braces). As long as the expression in parentheses (in this case, getline(in, s)) produces a “true” result, then the statement controlled by the while will continue to execute. It turns out that getline( ) will return a value that can be interpreted as “true” if another line has been read successfully, and “false” upon reaching the end of the input. Thus, the above while loop reads every line in the input file and sends each line to the output file.

getline( ) reads in the characters of each line until it discovers a newline (the termination character can be changed, but that won’t be an issue until the iostreams chapter in Volume 2). However, it discards the newline and doesn’t store it in the resulting string object. Thus, if we want the copied file to look just like the source file, we must add the newline back in, as shown.

Another interesting example is to copy the entire file into a single string object:

Because of the dynamic nature of strings, you don’t have to worry about how much storage to allocate for a string; you can just keep adding things and the string will keep expanding to hold whatever you put into it.

One of the nice things about putting an entire file into a string is that the string class has many functions for searching and manipulation that would then allow you to modify the file as a single string. However, this has its limitations. For one thing, it is often convenient to treat a file as a collection of lines instead of just a big blob of text. For example, if you want to add line numbering it’s much easier if you have each line as a separate string object. To accomplish this, we’ll need another approach.

With strings, we can fill up a string object without knowing how much storage we’re going to need. The problem with reading lines from a file into individual string objects is that you don’t know up front how many strings you’re going to need – you only know after you’ve read the entire file. To solve this problem, we need some sort of holder that will automatically expand to contain as many string objects as we care to put into it.

In fact, why limit ourselves to holding string objects? It turns out that this kind of problem – not knowing how many of something you have while you’re writing a program – happens a lot. And this “container” object sounds like it would be more useful if it would hold any kind of object at all! Fortunately, the Standard C++ Library has a ready-made solution: the standard container classes. The container classes are one of the real powerhouses of Standard C++.

There is often a bit of confusion between the containers and algorithms in the Standard C++ Library, and the entity known as the STL. The Standard Template Library was the name Alex Stepanov (who was working at Hewlett-Packard at the time) used when he presented his library to the C++ Standards Committee at the meeting in San Diego, California in Spring 1994. The name stuck, especially after HP decided to make it available for public downloads. Meanwhile, the committee integrated it into the Standard C++ Library, making a large number of changes. STL's development continues at Silicon Graphics (SGI; see http://www.sgi.com/Technology/STL). The SGI STL diverges from the Standard C++ Library on many subtle points. So although it's a popular misconception, the C++ Standard does not “include” the STL. It can be a bit confusing since the containers and algorithms in the Standard C++ Library have the same root (and usually the same names) as the SGI STL. In this book, I will say “The Standard C++ Library” or “The Standard Library containers,” or something similar and will avoid the term “STL.”

Even though the implementation of the Standard C++ Library containers and algorithms uses some advanced concepts and the full coverage takes two large chapters in Volume 2 of this book, this library can also be potent without knowing a lot about it. It’s so useful that the most basic of the standard containers, the vector, is introduced in this early chapter and used throughout the book. You’ll find that you can do a tremendous amount just by using the basics of vector and not worrying about the underlying implementation (again, an important goal of OOP). Since you’ll learn much more about this and the other containers when you reach the Standard Library chapters in Volume 2, it seems forgivable if the programs that use vector in the early portion of the book aren’t exactly what an experienced C++ programmer would do. You’ll find that in most cases, the usage shown here is adequate.

The vector class is a template, which means that it can be efficiently applied to different types. That is, we can create a vector of shapes, a vector of cats, a vector of strings, etc. Basically, with a template you can create a “class of anything.” To tell the compiler what it is that the class will work with (in this case, what the vector will hold), you put the name of the desired type in “angle brackets,” which means ‘<’ and ‘>’. So a vector of string would be denoted vector<string>. When you do this, you end up with a customized vector that will hold only string objects, and you’ll get an error message from the compiler if you try to put anything else into it.

Since vector expresses the concept of a “container,” there must be a way to put things into the container and get things back out of the container. To add a brand-new element on the end of a vector, you use the member function push_back( ). (Remember that, since it’s a member function, you use a ‘.’ to call it for a particular object.) The reason the name of this member function might seem a bit verbose – push_back( ) instead of something simpler like “put” – is because there are other containers and other member functions for putting new elements into containers. For example, there is an insert( ) member function to put something in the middle of a container. vector supports this but its use is more complicated and we won’t need to explore it until Volume 2 of the book. There’s also a push_front( ) (not part of vector) to put things at the beginning. There are many more member functions in vector and many more containers in the Standard C++ Library, but you’ll be surprised at how much you can do just knowing about a few simple features.

So you can put new elements into a vector with push_back( ), but how do you get these elements back out again? This solution is more clever and elegant – operator overloading is used to make the vector look like an array. The array (which will be described more fully in the next chapter) is a data type that is available in virtually every programming language so you should already be somewhat familiar with it. Arrays are aggregates, which mean they consist of a number of elements clumped together. The distinguishing characteristic of an array is that these elements are the same size and are arranged to be one right after the other. Most importantly, these elements can be selected by “indexing,” which means you can say “I want element number n” and that element will be produced, usually quickly. Although there are exceptions in programming languages, the indexing is normally achieved using square brackets, so if you have an array a and you want to produce element five, you say a[4] (note that indexing always starts at zero).

This very compact and powerful indexing notation is incorporated into the vector using operator overloading, just like ‘<<’ and ‘>>’ were incorporated into iostreams. Again, you don’t need to know how the overloading was implemented – that’s saved for a later chapter – but it’s helpful if you’re aware that there’s some magic going on under the covers in order to make the [ ] work with vector.

With that in mind, you can now see a program that uses vector. To use a vector, you include the header file <vector>:

Much of this program is similar to the previous one; a file is opened and lines are read into string objects one at a time. However, these string objects are pushed onto the back of the vector v. Once the while loop completes, the entire file is resident in memory, inside v.

The next statement in the program is called a for loop. It is similar to a while loop except that it adds some extra control. After the for, there is a “control expression” inside of parentheses, just like the while loop. However, this control expression is in three parts: a part which initializes, one that tests to see if we should exit the loop, and one that changes something, typically to step through a sequence of items. This program shows the for loop in the way you’ll see it most commonly used: the initialization part int i = 0 creates an integer i to use as a loop counter and gives it an initial value of zero. The testing portion says that to stay in the loop, i should be less than the number of elements in the vector v. (This is produced using the member function size( ), which I just sort of slipped in here, but you must admit it has a fairly obvious meaning.) The final portion uses a shorthand for C and C++, the “auto-increment” operator, to add one to the value of i. Effectively, i++ says “get the value of i, add one to it, and put the result back into i. Thus, the total effect of the for loop is to take a variable i and march it through the values from zero to one less than the size of the vector. For each value of i, the cout statement is executed and this builds a line that consists of the value of i (magically converted to a character array by cout), a colon and a space, the line from the file, and a newline provided by endl. When you compile and run it you’ll see the effect is to add line numbers to the file.

Because of the way that the ‘>>’ operator works with iostreams, you can easily modify the program above so that it breaks up the input into whitespace-separated words instead of lines:

The expression

is what gets the input one “word” at a time, and when this expression evaluates to “false” it means the end of the file has been reached. Of course, delimiting words by whitespace is quite crude, but it makes for a simple example. Later in the book you’ll see more sophisticated examples that let you break up input just about any way you’d like.

To demonstrate how easy it is to use a vector with any type, here’s an example that creates a vector<int>:

To create a vector that holds a different type, you just put that type in as the template argument (the argument in angle brackets). Templates and well-designed template libraries are intended to be exactly this easy to use.

This example goes on to demonstrate another essential feature of vector. In the expression

you can see that the vector is not limited to only putting things in and getting things out. You also have the ability to assign (and thus to change) to any element of a vector, also through the use of the square-brackets indexing operator. This means that vector is a general-purpose, flexible “scratchpad” for working with collections of objects, and we will definitely make use of it in coming chapters.

The intent of this chapter is to show you how easy object-oriented programming can be – if someone else has gone to the work of defining the objects for you. In that case, you include a header file, create the objects, and send messages to them. If the types you are using are powerful and well-designed, then you won’t have to do much work and your resulting program will also be powerful.

In the process of showing the ease of OOP when using library classes, this chapter also introduced some of the most basic and useful types in the Standard C++ library: the family of iostreams (in particular, those that read from and write to the console and files), the string class, and the vector template. You’ve seen how straightforward it is to use these and can now probably imagine many things you can accomplish with them, but there’s actually a lot more that they’re capable of[29]. Even though we’ll only be using a limited subset of the functionality of these tools in the early part of the book, they nonetheless provide a large step up from the primitiveness of learning a low-level language like C. and while learning the low-level aspects of C is educational, it’s also time consuming. In the end, you’ll be much more productive if you’ve got objects to manage the low-level issues. After all, the whole point of OOP is to hide the details so you can “paint with a bigger brush.”

However, as high-level as OOP tries to be, there are some fundamental aspects of C that you can’t avoid knowing, and these will be covered in the next chapter.

Solutions to selected exercises can be found in the electronic document The Thinking in C++ Annotated Solution Guide, available for a small fee from http://www.BruceEckel.com

[25] The boundary between compilers and interpreters can tend to become a bit fuzzy, especially with Python, which has many of the features and power of a compiled language but the quick turnaround of an interpreted language.

[26] Python is again an exception, since it also provides separate compilation.

[27] I would recommend using Perl or Python to automate this task as part of your library-packaging process (see www.Perl.org or www.Python.org).

[28] There are actually a number of variants of getline( ), which will be discussed thoroughly in the iostreams chapter in Volume 2.

[29] If you’re particularly eager to see all the things that can be done with these and other Standard library components, see Volume 2 of this book at www.BruceEckel.com, and also www.dinkumware.com.