Encapsulation, Inheritance, Polymorphism

and Generics

Construction is a large part of software

development.
Depending on the size of the project,
construction typically takes 30 to 80 percent
of the total time spent on a project.

Anything that takes up that much project

time affects the success of the project.

C++ is a general-purpose programming

language that:

is a better C
supports data abstraction
supports object-oriented programming
supports generic programming

C++, an object-oriented language founded

on C, was developed at Bell Laboratories in
the late 1970s.

C and C++ provides classes, polymorphism,

exception handling, templates, and it
provides more robust type checking than C
does.
C++ provides an extensive and powerful
standard library.

A class is a collection of data and routines

that share a common responsibility.
A key to effective programming is
maximizing the portion of a program that
you can safely ignore while working on any
one section of code.
Classes are the primary tool for
accomplishing that objective.

Abstraction is the ability to engage with a

concept while ignoring some of its details
handling different details at different levels.
The principal benefit of abstraction is that it
allows you to ignore irrelevant details.

Encapsulation picks up where abstraction

leaves off.
Abstraction says, "You're allowed to look at
an object at a high level of detail."
Encapsulation says, "Furthermore, you aren't
allowed to look at an object at any other level
of detail."

In designing a software system, certain

objects are similar to other objects, except
for a few differences.
Example: You can define a general type of
employee and then derive a full-time
employee and part-time employee, based on
the differences.

Inheritance combined with polymorphism

allows a Derived to inherit from a Base class
without having to retain all features of the
Base class.
The Derived class can also do some of the
things that the Base class does differently.

Templates allow functions and classes to

operate with generic types.
This allows a function or class to work on
many different data types without being
rewritten for each one.

The STL was created as the first library of

generic algorithms and data structures for
C++, with these ideas in mind: generic
programming, abstractness without loss of
efficiency.

In the final analysis, although C is one of the

world's great programming languages, there
is a limit to its ability to handle complexity.
Once a program exceeds somewhere between
25,000 and 100,000 lines of code, it
becomes so complex that it is difficult to
grasp as a totality.

C++ allows this barrier to be broken, and

helps the programmer comprehend and
manage larger programs.