Summary

In this chapter, we looked at major program-building tools that the programmer has for creating large complex programs. Most of these tools deal with aggregation of data into larger units: homogeneous containers (arrays) and heterogeneous objects (structures). These aggregate data types do not have operations of their own with the exception of the assignment for structures. All operations over aggregate objects have to be programmed in terms of operations over individual elements.

Since structure fields are accessed using individual field names; they are relatively safe. Array components are accessed using subscripts, and C++ provides neither compile-time nor run-time protection against illegal values of indices. This can easily lead ...

Get Core C++ A Software Engineering Approach now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.