Locked [c++][tutorial]

[Breaker]

I will give you a basic understanding of templates (the features we will use) as this tutorial progresses, don't worry if you don't completely understand it, it should be simple.

 

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Okay, so let me just throw some code at you before I break it down. Here is our basic class definition:

 

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Alright. Line by line breakdown: go

 

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this defines myStack as a template class

Well, what does that mean?

It means that the class can take a number of different forms, and we just create a template for it to do so. When we define our stack, we can specify what type we want to put in, for example:

• int
  
• float
  
• char
  
• even myStack classes!
  
• and just about EVERYTHING else that stores data
  

 

well, what does this mean?

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That simply defines a type that we can use to write our class. Every instance of custom_type is replaced at compile time with whatever type we want to use for that specific instance.

For those of you who know C, consider it a #define, except we can redefine what it means without a bunch of hacky garbage.

 

There really isn't a whole lot more after that, except this function has changed:

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Why did we add the & in there?

Simple: because we aren't dealing with built-in types. ALL ABSTRACT TYPES MUST BE PASSED BY REFERENCE, per C++ spec. This won't affect our code at all. Actually, it will be almost IDENTICAL to the last C++ stack tutorial.

This will be commented. Here is the whole thing:

 

oh wait! forgot to say one thing

Since this is a template class, all of the code MUST be in the header file (and I ABSOLUTELY hate this), so I will make it REALLY simple, and even put it inside the class definition.

 

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Now, that was VERY simple. I did not go into the drawn out version of the functions, you can find those in the "creating a C++ stack class" link/tutorial at the top of this thread.

 

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USING it, however is NOT as simple. If you are new to templates/have never seen them before, this may come difficult to you (because we don't have a whole lot to work off of here) but I will try and help.

 

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So, there you have it! Compile it and run it. Output should look like so:

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Who wants to see one that we can do this:

 

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Leave a comment if you want to see how to make variable type stacks (thats what REAL system stacks are)

Edited January 5, 2015 by you2004975
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