Just learned classes and...

I would like to know what to test myself with. I know pretty much everything to a basic understanding up till now so im just curious. Also I dont want to make tic-tac-toe or indian poker. only because i already made a fairly sucky tictactoe and I dont know how to play indian poker lol... I havent gotten any real suggestions from the other message board I was at.

Okay, so i just made an age evalutor program. It's simple.... Enter your age, prosses info, tell comments about how old you are. i'll upload the .cc file and you can complie it. don';t jusr copy the source instead try and figure it out on your own and only look if you need a little help . you'll need to know basic ammount of if loops, input, and crativity. wish you the most of luck :-D.


enter age [ ]
prosses
say you are X old
say something like oh, you're a preteen only.

thanks for using my age prog.




hope you enjoy it. i'll have more little programs ideas once i've made more. currently i'm making a caculator that can add,sub,mult,devide,sq, ect..
-jumbo

I like your suggestion, but I have already made one of those to lol!, but not to that extent. You just had alot more else ifs in it. What im trying to do is have a project thats going to test me , to see if I have a basic understanding of classes since that was the last thing I learned.

well, i have no idea what type of "test" you would like :-p. i have one suggestion though. i made an ATM bank account in one of my classes. basically it asked you if you wanted to get money,deposit, all the atm functions. you press the number, and if you're withdrawing money you'll need to type in your name and pin. the program get's the data base with all the names/ pins form a different file then reads it. it would take awhile, at least for me it did. i wrote it in C too.. so yea. i'm kind of in the same hole that you're in. i wanted to test my self but i don;'t know what to do . maybe we could bounce ideas off each other and find a good project to "test" our skills.

I like your idea. Im doing something sorta similiar, I just thought of it. Im not familiar with classes at all so this might be difficult. Im going to use a class to call a file and display it to the screen. but what im really aiming to do is either have those files hold my code or use them to interact with the user. I got a basic outline in my head of what its going to look like.

I like your suggestion, but I have already made one of those to lol!,

All the better. It is a good exercise to do the exact same program, but with classes, so you can see the differences.

Lol, 7stud, you'll appreciate this more than anyone else here, but that's what I'm doing with my Orc at the moment.

Attempting to make a class (monster) So that I could just use it to define Orc. Have some troubles geting the variables to pass about properly, (IE - Something that should be returning 11, is returning 0?)

But that's another story.

Class's confuse me, but I will succeed!

Well Im doing the bank idea... and using alot of file i/o to do it just to test my abilities with it. If you want to see what I have done so far its right here:

Originally Posted by Smeep

Lol, 7stud, you'll appreciate this more than anyone else here, but that's what I'm doing with my Orc at the moment.

Attempting to make a class (monster) So that I could just use it to define Orc. Have some troubles geting the variables to pass about properly, (IE - Something that should be returning 11, is returning 0?)

But that's another story.

Class's confuse me, but I will succeed!

As a first pass, just think of classes as fancy arrays. Like an array, a class is just a container with data inside it. However, instead of accessing the data with an integer index as you do with an array:

myarr[0]

you access the data with a name:

myobj.color

which makes it much easier to know what the data is. After all, how descriptive is myarr[0]? So, a simple class would look like this:

Code:

class Apple
{
public:
	string color;
	int size;
};

The useful thing about that class is that unlike an array, it can store different types inside it. With an array, you can only have all int's, all doubles, etc. inside it. With a class, you can have all different types inside, and you just access them by name:

Code:

#include <iostream>
#include <string>

using namespace std;

class Apple
{
public:
	string color;
	int size;
};

int main()
{
	Apple MyApple; //create your 'array substitute'

	//assign the members some values:
	MyApple.color = "red";
	MyApple.size = 5;

	//output the values:
	cout<<MyApple.color<<endl
	cout<<MyApple.size<<endl;

	return 0;
}

One of the most interesting 'types' a class can contain inside it is a function. It's almost just like calling a regular function--except you precede the function call with the name of the container:

MyApple.displaymembers();

A function inside a class can also operate directly on the other members of the class. For instance, this is what adding a displaymembers() function to the Apple class would look like:

Code:

class Apple
{
public:
	string color;
	int size;

	void displaymembers()
	{
		cout<<color<<endl
		cout<<size<<endl;
	}
};

The displaymembers() function can 'see' all the other class members. Here is an example of how you would use that class function:

Code:

int main()
{
	Apple MyApple; //create your 'array substitute'

	//assign the members some values:
	MyApple.color = "red";
	MyApple.size = 5;

	//call Apple function:
	MyApple.displaymembers();

	return 0;
}

The data is best kept private so you can explictly control how objects are used. The public section provides the interface to the user. Also if there is an error causing a member to take an illegal value you know that it was one of your member functions.

Originally Posted by Kirdra

The data is best kept private so you can explictly control how objects are used. The public section provides the interface to the user. Also if there is an error causing a member to take an illegal value you know that it was one of your member functions.

To further expand on what Kirda is saying. He is talking about making the data withing your class only accessable by your class via the private keyword.
Small Example.

Code:

class Dog
{ 
    public:
        //this function will set the age of our dog
        void setAge(const unsigned int setAge)
        {
            age = setAge;
        }
        //this function will get the dog's age
        unsigned int getAge() const
        {
            return age;
        }
    private: //this make the data only accesable to your class 
                 //you cannot do .age on this or you will get an error
        unsigned int age;
};

What are the restrictions on protected:?

Originally Posted by 7stud

As a first pass, just think of classes as fancy arrays. Like an array, a class is just a container with data inside it. However, instead of accessing the data with an integer index as you do with an array....

I know it's an older post but I found that it was VERY helpful in the fact that it was broken down and made understandable, especially to me as a newbie to programming.

/me shows his gratitude.

I'm glad it helped.

To the OP: Have you experimented with inheritance, abstract base classes, templated classes...?