Thread: Problems With C++

Encountered a problem? You aren't writing valid code at all.
I suggest you go back to the books or tutorials or wherever you are learning from and study some more!

You want to compare strings, so you should use a string (e.g., std::string), not an int, variable. Besides that, names like Scott and Gabby should be string literals, i.e., "Scott" and "Gabby".

What book are you using to learn C++?

1) How the heck are you supposed to read a name (string) as an integer? You must read into std::string.
2) Strings are marked as such by using "", so "test" is a string and simply test is not.
3)

Code:

else if (name != Scott, Gabby, Sarah, Alex, Christian) {

Not valid code. You must check if name is not equal to Scott AND it's not equal to Gabby AND, and so on. Logical and is an operator named &&.
4) \n is a string literal, so it must be inside a string and not outside -> "test"\n BAD! "test\n" GOOD.

All these mistakes suggest you don't actually know the language you're trying to write, so I do suggest you go back to reading tutorials or getting a book and properly learning the language first.

You're supposed to learn the language.
There's no use in asking all these questions because you obviously do not understand the basic syntax. Books are great on teaching all of that.
You can look at strings, reading strings and if statements.

I'm not using a book, but rather this website and http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/
I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong...

There are many, many errors. Online resources are fine, but I suggest that you read You Can Do It! A Beginner's Introduction to Computer Programming by Glassborow or Accelerated C++ by Koenig and Moo.

So am I supposed to put std::string in for int name ? What else do I need to do after that?

Below is an example program that does roughly what you want to do. You can compare it to your current attempt and spot the differences, though it may not make that much sense to you unless you learn more.

Code:

#include <iostream>
#include <string>

int main()
{
    std::cout << "To begin, please enter your name: ";
    std::string name;
    std::cin >> name;
    std::cin.ignore(); // Throws away "enter".

    if (name == "Scott")
    {
        std::cout << "HAHA! That is a moronic name!\n";
    }
    else if (name == "Gabby")
    {
        std::cout << "Get a hobby, punk!\n";
    }
    else if (name == "Sarah")
    {
        std::cout << "Take a chill pill and let your endorphins stop pumping!\n";
    }
    else if (name == "Alex")
    {
        std::cout << "Stop playing, or else your fingers will fall off!\n";
    }
    else if (name == "Christian")
    {
        std::cout << "Wanna hook me up?\n";
    }
    else
    {
        std::cout << "If you can't handle it, go cry in the corner!\n";
    }

    std::cin.get();
}

And the trick to avoid extremely long lines is that you can break up string literals:

Code:

cout << "this is some very long text "
        "but thankfully I can split it up "
        "over several lines";

You can also save lines and width by outputting common text:

Code:

if (name == "Gabby" || name == "Sarah")
{
	cout << ""Wow...I must be a psychic C++ program!  I can already tell that yours is a name of someone who ";
	if (name == "Gabby") cout << "studies way too much! Get a hobby, punk!\n";
	else if (name == "Sarah") cout << "has way too much energy for some situations! Take a chill pill and let your endorphins stop pumping!\n";
}

And you forgot to add return 0;

Explicitly returning 0 at the end of the global main() function is optional in C++.

Originally Posted by laserlight

Explicitly returning 0 at the end of the global main() function is optional in C++.

After a recent debate on this board both on whether the existence of the implicit return 0 was a good idea, and whether using it is bad practice, I checked and found that Stroustrup himself uses it - a casual perusal of TC++PL indicates that he never uses an explicit "return 0;" at the closing brace, and in this page

http://www.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq2.html

which was last updated 9 days ago (*), only the first two examples of main() use an explicit return 0, presumably for pedagogical reasons (he's emphasizing that main() returns int) and none of the dozen or so that follow.

(*) Edit: According to Firefox's Page Info - the text itself says October 10. Anyway, it's much more recent than TC++PL.