WellOriginally Posted by laserlight
at least until you become a Roman citizen and can get away with acting like you are Greek (with all due respect to GReaper).
Wellat least until you become a Roman citizen and can get away with acting like you are Greek (with all due respect to GReaper
Devoted my life to programming...
All of this hair-splitting is unnecessary though, really - everyone here should have known what I meant from the very beginning. Instead, some chose to sift through my words like a pack of lawyers, for no other reason than to claim some hollow victory of semantics.
Touche!
Anyone may do as they are so enclined insofar as using either a main function directly or else by way of some class. Both surely have their own merits and disadvantages, but neither is "wrong", "incorrect", or "bad style". It's all just a matter of preference.
It's not hair splitting. I said "main is not part of a class" and you said "depends".
No, it doesn't depend. It's not part of a class. It's the entry point to every C++ program. That's all. There are no split hairs. It is always there. It's not part of a class. Period.
You didn't say "I make a class that I call from main and have it be the starting point for the remainder of my program."I didn't sift through your words. I took the first thing you said in reply to the first thing I said, and the first thing you said was wrong. Period.WRONG. There is no main "by way of some class".
Quzah.
Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.
I can see where you are coming from, but consider GReaper's confusion expressed in post #9 that required clarifications from various people, including yourself. To be fair, quzah's statement was inaccurate too: a function named main can indeed be a member of a class; but the global main function cannot be a member of a class.
Look up a C++ Reference and learn How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
Your method might force the user to declare command line arguments and environment variables (not to mention a useless integer) to be passed along to the object. Mine does not. I have merely simplified a needlessly redundant artifice of C++ programming. How could that possibly be labeled "unnecessary"?You are proposing that your unusual and unnecessary method of doing things be adopted? How absurd!
Sure, it may be more akin to what ForeverAndOne is used to in Java, and maybe GReaper likewise finds it familiar, but when in Rome, do as the Romans do... at least until you become a Roman citizen and can get away with acting like you are Greek (with all due respect to GReaper
If "acting like a Greek" means being creative and open-minded, sure, I'll go with that. I don't prescribe to anything more than safe, intelligent coding practices. It that's a crime (and in Rome, everything seems to be), so be it. As they say, "I'll follow the Sun".
I should have been more precise. The entry point to your program is not part of a class as it is in Java.
Quzah.
Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.
This may have been to the root of the confusion, I suppose. I was referring to the fact that my class defines it's own main function, while the real 'main' is invoked implicitly from within a header file. I thought I was being clear. Perhaps not.
That isn't actually an advantage, and there would not necessarily be a "useless integer" passed with what I stated as more common in post #10.
I don't see how it is "a needlessly redundant artifice" to begin with.
You did not state the details earlier, so that was not clear, though I understood that you were not saying that there would not be a global main function at all. However, to someone with less knowledge of C++, it would and did seem that you were saying that there would not be a global main function. That's unfortunate, but having been clarified, so be it.
What exactly do you mean by this? I understand it to mean that you define the main function in a header file that is included in exactly one source file.
Look up a C++ Reference and learn How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
Agreed.
Correct. From the header file, 'main' invokes a virtual function on a singleton pointer to the program's sub-base-class which then propagates the parameters to the actual (CRTP) base class, which is customizable via a 'traits' parameter (optionally) specified by the final derived class (to control the underlying container types to be used, etc; in case you want to use a map-type interface for the environment variables or what have you).
