All you C++/Visual Studio gurus, i need your help!

[Automaggin2]

I need include files for visual studio. I need stuff like rando.h, cpstring.h and cpsring.cpp, math.h, ballon.h, all that good stuff. can anyone send them to me or tell me where i can get them!

[Miscue]

???

just type

#include (blahblah.h)
replace ( ) with correct brackets


and use it... should find built it libraries for you.

[Automaggin2]

yea i know, for some rason i dont ahve the libraries, and its really making me mad. it only has iostream.h

[Miscue]

Run your installer again and make sure you have you're libraries installed.

[rdb123]

cstring? Use apstring, apvector, etc.

If you can't find them online, email me and I'll send them out to you.

-Ron

[Automaggin2]

apstring? apvector? never heard of them. hmmmm..

[rdb123]

They made them for use in AP Classes in highschool. Some of the advantages of apstrings over regular strings is that you can set 2 apstrings equal to each other; with standard strings, you would have to use strcpy().

[Miscue]

Personally, I'd just get used to using standard string libraries... and using strtok, strcpy, and whatever.

[rdb123]

Hehe Miscue, well why roll an object over logs when you could attach wheels?

[dave_p]

Hehe Miscue, well why roll an object over logs when you could attach wheels?

thats not nice. why use canned libraries that coddle users? be clever and extend the string classes to meet your needs. overload the = operator to set strings equal.use the + operator to concatenate strings if thats what you want to do(although i find the standard libraries fine as is). you may even learn something about inheritance and polymorphism.

[rdb123]

dave_p, you could do the same thing with this below:

apstring word1,word2,word3;

cin >> word1 >> word2;

word1 += word2;

=)

-Ron

I don't see a reason to reinvent the wheel hehe.

[Miscue]

Originally posted by dave_p


thats not nice. why use canned libraries that coddle users? be clever and extend the string classes to meet your needs. overload the = operator to set strings equal.use the + operator to concatenate strings if thats what you want to do(although i find the standard libraries fine as is). you may even learn something about inheritance and polymorphism.

Agreed. The standard libraries do whatever you need.

foo = bar; foo += bar; is a lot less readable to me than

strcpy(foo, bar); strcat(foo, bar); which are self-explanatory, have familiar side-effects, and simply work

Use standards.

[dave_p]

rdb123:

i agree, code reuse is a good thing and the foundation of good modern programming. unfortunately you may not always have the libraries you need available. in a learning type environment its better to expose people to the down and dirty bare bones programming as opposed to isolating them from it. this is only my opinion of course. i just cant take things for what they are, i need to dissect them and know how to build them from scratch myself.

[rdb123]

Good point dave_p.

Miscue: I'm more comfortable with the += operand since in a good amount of programs, you use it in conjunction with integers and such. I guess it's a matter of preference though. However, I like the ability to declare an apstring without specifying a length.

-Ron

[Miscue]

I took a look at apstring. Maybe I missed something, but I don't see a tokenizer in there... among many other things.

I understand the AP boards reasoning behind simplifying strings with built in safeties for students... when it comes to AP test time, there's less work involved with strings because a lot of things are automated.

However... when handling strings as purely an ADT... rather than how the system itself handles them... I think the student loses useful insight and practice in robust programming.

If you learn to think of things more in terms of a system level, rather than a higher level abstraction... it can do you a lot of good when you're programming something of value... going on to more advanced things... and not something merely academic. Eventually you may run into something that requires carnal knowledge of character arrays...

For instance... say you wanted a program that accepted command line parameters... like a unix shell or something. Simple right? Well, the version of apstring I looked at won't help you break apart the command line. All example code you will find to help you with your shell will not use apstring.

Code in books... and pre-existing code... is going to be built around string.h/cstring.h - you're gonna have to eventually familiarize yourself with it.

In the job setting, if I saw somebody using something that's not standard (that was not an improvement)... I'd make them fix it. Every programmer knows what string.h is... every programmer knows it works fine and knows how to use it. Only a few people coming out of high school will know what apstring is. If I have to debug someone else's code... it would piss me off and waste a lot of time if they used something non-standard out of laziness when a standard exists.

A programmer would have no way of knowing if your apstring library had some minor nuance that caused a problem... a memory leak perhaps. They'd have to carefully study an unfamiliar library... but why? We all know that string.h works! And we're very familiar with it after years and years of using it...