How much do people know?

Okay a little background about where i stand at the moment . I am relatively happy with functions,classes ,objects ,constructors ,pointers , references . I think you will find that is about day 9 in learn c++ in 21 days tutorial P).

Eventually I would like to program games like pac man and frogger .(ask your parents)

I want to get into the graphical side of things soon through windows API and i get the impression that templates, inheritance , operator overloading and virtual functions (the stuff i havent got to yet) seem pretty specialised and not that relevent to the above games .

my question.

1. What do you think is the percentage of c++ programmers (not newbies) that understand and implement inheritance , operator overloading and virtual functions to there programs. Do most programmers find the above techniques a luxary they can do without?

I have a hard time believing that many professional C++ programmers forgo templates, inheritance, and operator overloading (forgoing inheritance implies not using virtual functions). Some problems are handled very nicely by each of the above... in those cases, not using them just because there is another way to solve a problem simply isn't logical.

Gweech,

A good, and interesting, question. Speaking not from a professional, but rather an academic, standpoint, you would be doing yourself a huge disservice by skipping over a serious study of inheritance and operator overloading. (Of the four specific areas you mention, I would rank these #1 and #2.)

Virtual functions (and "pure" virtual functions) would have to come in at a real close #3, in my opinion, with templates coming in at #4.

In a seeming contradiction to what I've said, many "experts", including Bjarne Stroustrup, would agree that the quality of the C++ language that you use is more important than the quantity of the language that you know.

Frankly speaking, a number of the questions that come to this Board drive my nose straight into a reference book of some description. I, for one, cannot 'memorize' every detail of every process involved in writing a program. But, that's me...

Bottom line? Don't discount the voices of experience, but decide for yourself what you want to do with your knowledge. I'm betting that you'll keep the learning process going. :)

-Skipper

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Originally posted by The Gweech
Okay a little background about where i stand at the moment . I am relatively happy with functions,classes ,objects ,constructors ,pointers , references . I think you will find that is about day 9 in learn c++ in 21 days tutorial P).

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You're doing pretty good if you understand that after day nine of a tutorial book.
Most of the stuff you mention is core to C++ and/or most OOP languages. Matbe I'm misunderstanding your question, maybe you want something more like VB.
If you make a game like Frogger, won't you have to make a frog class, a car class, a street class, etc? They'll interact with WinAPI, but you still have to set up the game.

You have to know how design a large program using
inheritance and OOP. This is the hard part. Knowing what
the language does is easy.

I am a C++ programmer.

I believe experience will take a programmer far. Learning a programming is very easy. I began learning ASM for the first time a week ago. I honestly feel ASM programming language is easy.

In the end, programming is all about experience and desire to push the limit of your imagination and ability to solve problems.

Learn any language, but do not forget to program.

Kuphryn

I find asm easy too kurphyn. The only problem with it is that it requires so much code to do things, making it not practice to write in.

There has been a few constructive posts there and i have built a loose conclusion.

Inheritance, operator overloading, virtual functions seem to be used in large projects if not mainly proffessional projects.

Maybe its just that i am finding it hard to look beyond tic tac toe games.

I can see the relavence of the above programming techniques in games like Gran Tourismo and Age of Empires but not in Pac Man and Space Invaders . Is that about right?

also as an after note you 2 guys finding asm easy no one likes a smarty pants :)

While on a trip to Ireland, an American couple came upon an elderly gentleman along the road and asked him where they might find scenic places to take photographs.

"It's hard to know what's in another man's eye", he replied.

;)

-Skipper