Thursday 05 September 2019 The Forest Road Reader, No 2.28 : STinC++ - Chapter One Wrap Up

I’ve reached the end of the chapter 1 and have written five programs:

For Kernighan and Plauger, each program has been progressively more complex than the last - a simple loop, then a variable, a conditional, then multiple conditions, and several types of loop. They have, through the course of their five programs, managed to show off all the fundamental features of Pascal. In contrast, I have done no such thing in my efforts with C++.

Thanks to the functions provided in the C++ standard library, I have little increase in code complexity for the first four programs. I might have had to get hold of some slightly bigger concepts - iterators, input and output as sequences you can iterate over - but once those are familiar, my wordcount is no more complicated than where I started with copy.

Things did get slightly hairier for detab but not particularly so. There’s a little bit to grapple with around function objects, but nothing too strenuous. That I still haven’t written an explicit loop in C++ helps with understanding the code by eliminating what is essentially boilerplate.

It’s been fun! I’ve learned some new things already - about the tooling I’m using, and also about the C++ library itself. The idea of using std::transform to massage a sequence of characters into a sequence of strings is, in retrospect, obvious but I hadn’t thought of doing anything like that before.

While I’ve hardly mentioned it, all the code has been written in test-first fashion. At this early stage in my progress through the book, I’m pretty much only dealing with a single function, the boundary cases are obvious, plus, in most cases, I’ve barely written any code. Nonetheless, I’d feel a bit icky just diving straight in and, even with code this straightforward, I have found and prevented bugs that might otherwise have eluded me.

On to chapter two!