Learning to Program in C++

Baby Steps

If we already understand the problem we're going to solve, the next step is to figure out a plan of attack, which we will then break down into small enough steps to be expressed in C++. This is called stepwise refinement, since we start out with a "coarse" solution and refine it until the steps are within the capability of the C++ language. For a complex problem, this may take several intermediate steps, but let's start out with a simple example. Say that we want to know how much older one person is than another. We might start with the following general outline:

1. Get two ages from user.

2. Calculate difference of ages.

3. Print the result.

This in turn can be broken down further, as follows:

1. Get two ages from user.

   1. Ask user for first age.