Thread: Some questions again

Originally Posted by h3ro

1. Why return a reference?

Because it avoids creating another copy of the object and it avoids using pointers for simple things. In short, it's more efficient.

2. What is the benefits of inline? From reading only I have gathered that it makes the program smaller and bigger. Faster and slower and so on.

Inline makes the code faster, but can make the code bigger.

3. When to use the keyword extern?

When you have a variable defined in a source file other than the one it's used in. Since you can't define something twice, and the compiler can't see the a variable in another source file, you must declare it as extern to tell the compiler it exists elsewhere.

4. How do I assign something to a const class member variable?

Code:

class Player{
public:
   Player(std::string n);
   ...
private:
   const std::string name;
};

You can't. You must initialize it with the initialization list in the constructor.

1. Why return a reference?

For function chaining, or to allow a member variable to be modified in a syntactically nice way.

2. What is the benefits of inline? From reading only I have gathered that it makes the program smaller and bigger. Faster and slower and so on.

Indeed, the benefits depend on the context. It may avoid the overhead of a function call, but may introduce executable code bloat.

3. When to use the keyword extern?

See Stroustrup's glossary on extern.

4. How do I assign something to a const class member variable?

You don't. You just initialise it in the constructor.

To your fourth question, you can assign a static constant data member in a class declaration:

Code:

class Foo
{
public:
   static const int ARRAY_SIZE = 10;
....

But I may of mis-read what you meant