Thursday, 15 March 2012

Basics of OOP-Summary:

What is Object-Oriented Programming?

Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) is different from procedural programming languages (C, Pascal, etc.) in several ways. Everything in OOP is grouped as "objects" (see data abstraction). OOP, defined in the purest sense, is implemented by sending messages to objects. To understand this concept, we first need to know what is an object? An object can be considered a "thing" that can perform a set of activities. The set of activities that the object performs defines the object's behavior. For example, a "StudentStatus" object can tell you its grade point average, year in school, or can add a list of courses taken. A "Student" object can tell you its name or its address.
The object's interface consists of a set of commands, each command performing a specific action. An object asks another object to perform an action by sending it a message. The requesting (sending) object is referred to as sender and the receiving object is referred to as receiver.

Control is given to the receiving object until it completes the command; control then returns to the sending object.
For example, a School object asks the Student object for its name by sending it a message asking for its name. The receiving Student object returns the name back to the sending object.

A message can also contain information the sending objects needs to pass to the reveiving object, called the argument in the message. A receiving object always returns a value back to the sending object. This returned value may or may not be useful to the sending object.
For example, the School object now wants to change the student's name. It does this by sending the Student object a message to set its name to a new name. The new address is passed as an argument in the message. In this case, the School object does not care about the return value from the message.

It is very common that a message will cause other messages to be sent, either to itself or to other objects, in order to complete its task. This is called sequential operation. Control will not return to the original sending object untill all other messages have been completed. For example, in the following diagram, Object A sends a message to Object B. For Object B to process that message it sends a message to Object C.Likewise, Object C sends a mesage to Object D. Object D returns to Object C who then returns to Object B who returns to Object A. Control does not return to Object A until all the other messages have completed.

Sequential Operation

How do receiving objects interpret messages from the senders? How are the messages processed?

Method

Each message has code that associated with it. When an object receives a message, code is excercuted. In other words, these messages determine an object's behavior and the code determines how the object carries out each message. The code that is associated with each message is called a method. The message name is also called the method name due to its close association with the method.
When an object receives a message, it determines what method is being requested and passes control to the method. An object has as many methods as it it takes to perform its designed actions.
Refer to the following diagram, name, name:, address and name:address are method names for the Student object (Please see "Object and Message Naming" for more information). When the Student object receive the name message, the name message passes control to the name method defined in Student.

Methods that operate on specific objects are instance methods and messages that invoke instance methods are called instance message. Methods that operate on specific classes are class methods. This will be discussed in more details in later chapter.

Methods are similar to subroutines, procedures, or functions found in procedural languages (C, Pascal). For example, a method name equates to a subroutine name, and the code for the method equates to the code found in a subroutine. Sending a message to an object is similar to calling a subroutine.
See also "Basic Structure of a Method".
Each object need to keep the information on how to perform its defined behavior. Some objects also contain variables that support their bahavior. These variables are called instance variables. Only the instance method for an object can refer to and change the values stored in the instance variables. The instance methods for other objects cannot refer to this object's data. An object may only access another object's data by sending it messages.This is called encapsulation and assures that there is a secure process for getting to an object's data.

Object's Data

Refer to the following diagram, the instance variables variableOne through variableX can only be accessed by the sender via instance methods methodOne through methodX. The sender can not refer to the variables directly by itslef.

Unlike procedural progamming where common data areas are often used for sharing information, object-oriented programming discourages direct access to common data (other than the use of global variables) by other programs. Only the object that "owns" the data can change its contant. Other objects can view or change this data by sending message to the "owner."
The instance variable names can be identical to the method names that associate with them. For example, the Student object has methods of name, address, and major as well as instance variables of name, address, and major. Smalltalk distinguishes variable identifier and a method identifier by the identifier's position in the expression. Another important concept of object-oriented programming is inheritance. Inheritance allows a class to have the same behavior as another class and extend or tailor that behavior to provide special action for specific needs.

Inheritance

Let's use the following application as an example. Both Graduate class and Undergraduate class have similar bahavior such as managing a name, an address, a major, and a GPA. Rather than put this bahavior in both of these classes, the bahavior is placed in a new class called Student. Both Graduate and Undergraduate become subclass of the Student class, and both inherit the Student behavior.

Both Graduate and Undergraduate classes can then add additional behavior that is unique to them. For example, Graduate can be either Master's program or phD program. On the other hand, Undergraduate class might want to keep track of either the student is Freshman, Sophmore, Junior or Senior.
Classes that inherit from a class are called subclasses. The class a subclass inherits from are called superclass. In the example, Student is a superclass for Graduate and Undergraduate. Graduate and Undergraduate are subclasses of Student.

Another benefit of separating implementaion from behavior is polymorphism. Polymorphism allows two or more objects respond to the same message. A method called name could also be implemented for an object of the class Course. Even though the implementation of this name message may return a course number and a course title, its protocol is the same as the name message to the Student object.

Polymorphism

Polymorphism allows a sending object to communicate with different objects in a consistant manner without worrying about how many different implementations of a message.

An analogy of polymorphism to daily life is how students response to a school bell. Every student knows the significant of the bell. When the bell (message) rings, however, it has its own meaning to different students (objects). Some students go home, some go to the library, and some go to other classes. Every student responds to the bell, but how they response to it might be different.

Another example of polymorphism is the function of printing. Every printable object must know how to print itself. The message is the same to all the different objects: print, but the actual implementation of what they must do to print themselves varies.

The sending object does not have to know how the receiving object implement the message. Only the receiving objects worries about that. Assume that there is a printPage method in a Document object that has the responsibility of printing a page. To print the page, the printPage method sends the print message to each object on the page. The Document does not need to know what types of objects are on the page, only that each object supports the behavior of printing.

New objects can be added to the page without affecting the printPage method. This method still sends the print message and the new object provides its own print method in response to that message.
Polymorphism allows the sending object to communicate with receiving objects without having to understand what type of object it is, as long as the receiving objects support the messages.

What is An Object?

Reusability

The Power of Reuse is:

One of the most important features of object-oriented programming is the ability to modify existing solution to solve new problems. If a particular kind of problem has been solved using the OOP approach, a similar but slightly different problem can usually be solved by making some changes in the object-message protocal that already exist.
Most of the time, this requires adding new messages. Other cases may require adding new objects and new messages to which those objects respond.

Reusability is probably the most important and the strongest feature of Smalltalk. Although procedural languages can be reuse too, Smalltalk makes programming for reuse much easier.

Polymorphism

Another benefit of separating implementaion from behavior is polymorphism. Polymorphism allows two or more objects respond to the same message. A method called name could also be implemented for an object of the class Course. Even though the implementation of this name message may return a course number and a course title, its protocol is the same as the name message to the Student object. Polymorphism allows a sending object to communicate with different objects in a consistant manner without worrying about how many different implementations of a message.

Difference b/w Class & Object:

What Is the Difference Between a Class and Object?

Edward Yourdan defines a class as, “A collection of one or more objects with a uniform set of attributes and services, including a description of how to create new objects in the class.”

Grady Booch defines an object as, “An object has state, behavior, and identity; The structure and behavior of similar objects are defined in their common class; The terms instance and object are interchangeable.”

From these two definitions we can see that there is a difference between a class and an object. A class is the definition, or blueprint, for an object. Classes don’t real ever exist, they are plans. We use the class to create an object which has identity. That is, an object exists, has values in its properties and can execute behaviors.

This difference between a class and an object is a subtle but very important one. It is analogous to visiting an architect to have a new house built. The architect will draw up plans for the house that show all the rooms and elevations etc. However, you cannot move into the plans and live there. The plans must be used to build a house. The house is an object while the plans are a class.

Difference b/w Overloading & Overriding

Difference between overloading and overriding is as follows...

In overloading, there is a relationship between methods available in the same class

Overloading does not block inheritance from the superclass whereas overriding blocks inheritance from the superclass.

In overloading, separate methods share the same name whereas in overriding,subclass method replaces the superclass.

Overloading must have different method signatures whereas overriding must have same signature.

Inheritance between classes

A key feature of C++ classes is inheritance. Inheritance allows to create classes which are derived from other classes, so that they automatically include some of its "parent's" members, plus its own. For example, we are going to suppose that we want to declare a series of classes that describe polygons like our CRectangle, or like CTriangle. They have certain common properties, such as both can be described by means of only two sides: height and base.

This could be represented in the world of classes with a class CPolygon from which we would derive the two other ones: CRectangle and CTriangle.

The class CPolygon would contain members that are common for both types of polygon. In our case: width and height. And CRectangle and CTriangle would be its derived classes, with specific features that are different from one type of polygon to the other.

Classes that are derived from others inherit all the accessible members of the base class. That means that if a base class includes a member A and we derive it to another class with another member called B, the derived class will contain both members A and B.

In order to derive a class from another, we use a colon (:) in the declaration of the derived class using the following format:

class derived_class_name: public base_class_name { /*...*/ };
Where derived_class_name is the name of the derived class and base_class_name is the name of the class on which it is based. The public access specifier may be replaced by any one of the other access specifiers protected and private. This access specifier limits the most accessible level for the members inherited from the base class: The members with a more accessible level are inherited with this level instead, while the members with an equal or more restrictive access level keep their restrictive level in the derived class.

// derived classes
#include<iostream>
using namespace std;

class CPolygon {
  protected:
    int width, height;
  public:
    void set_values (int a, int b)
      { width=a; height=b;}
  };

class CRectangle: public CPolygon {
  public:
    int area ()
      { return (width * height); }
  };

class CTriangle: public CPolygon {
  public:
    int area ()
      { return (width * height / 2); }
  };
  
int main()

{
  CRectangle rect;
  CTriangle trgl;
  rect.set_values (4,5);
  trgl.set_values (4,5);
  cout << rect.area() << endl;
  cout << trgl.area() << endl;
  return 0;
}

20
10

The objects of the classes CRectangle and CTriangle each contain members inherited from CPolygon. These are: width, height and set_values().

The protected access specifier is similar to private. Its only difference occurs in fact with inheritance. When a class inherits from another one, the members of the derived class can access the protected members inherited from the base class, but not its private members.

Since we wanted width and height to be accessible from members of the derived classes CRectangle and CTriangle and not only by members of CPolygon, we have used protected access instead of private.

It can be summarized in different access types according to who can access them in the following way:

Access	public	protected	private
members of the same class	yes	yes	yes
members of derived classes	yes	yes	no
not members	yes	no	no

Where "not members" represent any access from outside the class, such as from main(), from another class or from a function.

In our example, the members inherited by CRectangle and CTriangle have the same access permissions as they had in their base class CPolygon:

CPolygon::width           // protected access
CRectangle::width         // protected access

CPolygon::set_values()    // public access
CRectangle::set_values()  // public access

This is because we have used the public keyword to define the inheritance relationship on each of the derived classes:

class CRectangle: public CPolygon { ... }

This public keyword after the colon (:) denotes the most accessible level the members inherited from the class that follows it (in this case CPolygon) will have. Since public is the most accessible level, by specifying this keyword the derived class will inherit all the members with the same levels they had in the base class.

If we specify a more restrictive access level like protected, all public members of the base class are inherited as protected in the derived class. Whereas if we specify the most restricting of all access levels: private, all the base class members are inherited as private.

For example, if daughter was a class derived from mother that we defined as:

class daughter: protected mother;

This would set protected as the maximum access level for the members of daughter that it inherited from mother. That is, all members that were public in mother would become protected in daughter. Of course, this would not restrict daughter to declare its own public members. That maximum access level is only set for the members inherited from mother.

If we do not explicitly specify any access level for the inheritance, the compiler assumes private for classes declared with class keyword and public for those declared with struct.

Wednesday, 14 March 2012

Constructors, Destructors & Default Constructors

Constructors and Destructors:

Objects generally need to initialize variables or assign dynamic memory during their process of creation to become operative and to avoid returning unexpected values during their execution. For example, what would happen if in the previous example we called the member function area() before having called function set_values()? Probably we would have gotten an undetermined result since the members x and y would have never been assigned a value.

In order to avoid that, a class can include a special function called constructor, which is automatically called whenever a new object of this class is created. This constructor function must have the same name as the class, and cannot have any return type; not even void.

We are going to implement CRectangle including a constructor:

// example: class constructor
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

class CRectangle {
    int width, height;
  public:
    CRectangle (int,int);
    int area () {return (width*height);}
};

CRectangle::CRectangle (int a, int b) {
  width = a;
  height = b;
}

int main () {
  CRectangle rect (3,4);
  CRectangle rectb (5,6);
  cout << "rect area: " << rect.area() << endl;
  cout << "rectb area: " << rectb.area() << endl;
  return 0;
}

        rect area: 12
        rectb area: 30

As you can see, the result of this example is identical to the previous one. But now we have removed the member function set_values(), and have included instead a constructor that performs a similar action: it initializes the values of width and height with the parameters that are passed to it.

See how these arguments are passed to the constructor at the moment at which the objects of this class are created:

CRectangle rect (3,4);
CRectangle rectb (5,6);

Constructors cannot be called explicitly as if they were regular member functions. They are only executed when a new object of that class is created.

You can also see how neither the constructor prototype declaration (within the class) nor the latter constructor definition include a return value; not even void.

The destructor fulfills the opposite functionality. It is automatically called when an object is destroyed, either because its scope of existence has finished (for example, if it was defined as a local object within a function and the function ends) or because it is an object dynamically assigned and it is released using the operator delete.

The destructor must have the same name as the class, but preceded with a tilde sign (~) and it must also return no value.

The use of destructors is especially suitable when an object assigns dynamic memory during its lifetime and at the moment of being destroyed we want to release the memory that the object was allocated.

// example on constructors and destructors
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

class CRectangle {
    int *width, *height;
  public:
    CRectangle (int,int);
    ~CRectangle ();
    int area () {return (*width * *height);}
};

CRectangle::CRectangle (int a, int b) {
  width = new int;
  height = new int;
  *width = a;
  *height = b;
}

CRectangle::~CRectangle () {
  delete width;
  delete height;
}

int main()
{
  CRectangle rect (3,4);
  CRectangle rectb;
  cout << "rect area: " << rect.area() << endl;
  cout << "rectb area: " << rectb.area() << endl;
  return 0;
}
            rect area: 12
            rectb area: 25

In this case, rectb was declared without any arguments, so it has been initialized with the constructor that has no parameters, which initializes both width and height with a value of 5.

Important: Notice how if we declare a new object and we want to use its default constructor (the one without parameters), we do not include parentheses ():

CRectangle rectb;   // right
CRectangle rectb(); // wrong!

Default constructor:

If you do not declare any constructors in a class definition, the compiler assumes the class to have a default constructor with no arguments. Therefore, after declaring a class like this one:

class CExample {
  public:
    int a,b,c;
    void multiply (int n, int m) { a=n; b=m; c=a*b; }
  };

The compiler assumes that CExample has a default constructor, so you can declare objects of this class by simply declaring them without any arguments:

CExample ex;

But as soon as you declare your own constructor for a class, the compiler no longer provides an implicit default constructor. So you have to declare all objects of that class according to the constructor prototypes you defined for the class:

class CExample {
  public:
    int a,b,c;
    CExample (int n, int m) { a=n; b=m; };
    void multiply () { c=a*b; };
  };

Here we have declared a constructor that takes two parameters of type int. Therefore the following object declaration would be correct:

CExample ex (2,3);

But,

CExample ex;

Would not be correct, since we have declared the class to have an explicit constructor, thus replacing the default constructor.

But the compiler not only creates a default constructor for you if you do not specify your own. It provides three special member functions in total that are implicitly declared if you do not declare your own. These are the copy constructor, the copy assignment operator, and the default destructor.

The copy constructor and the copy assignment operator copy all the data contained in another object to the data members of the current object. For CExample, the copy constructor implicitly declared by the compiler would be something similar to:

CExample::CExample (const CExample& rv) {
  a=rv.a;  b=rv.b;  c=rv.c;
  }

Therefore, the two following object declarations would be correct:

CExample ex (2,3);
CExample ex2 (ex);   // copy constructor (data copied from ex)

Sunday, 11 March 2012

Classes

A class is an expanded concept of a data structure: instead of holding only data, it can hold both data and functions.

An object is an instantiation of a class. In terms of variables, a class would be the type, and an object would be the variable.

Classes are generally declared using the keyword class, with the following format:

class class_name {
  access_specifier_1:
    member1;
  access_specifier_2:
    member2;
  ...
  } object_names;

Where class_name is a valid identifier for the class, object_names is an optional list of names for objects of this class. The body of the declaration can contain members, that can be either data or function declarations, and optionally access specifiers.

All is very similar to the declaration on data structures, except that we can now include also functions and members, but also this new thing called access specifier. An access specifier is one of the following three keywords: private, public or protected. These specifiers modify the access rights that the members following them acquire:

private members of a class are accessible only from within other members of the same class or from their friends.
protected members are accessible from members of their same class and from their friends, but also from members of their derived classes.
Finally, public members are accessible from anywhere where the object is visible.

By default, all members of a class declared with the class keyword have private access for all its members. Therefore, any member that is declared before one other class specifier automatically has private access. For example:

class CRectangle {
    int x, y;
  public:
    void set_values (int,int);
    int area (void);
  } rect;

Declares a class (i.e., a type) called CRectangle and an object (i.e., a variable) of this class called rect. This class contains four members: two data members of type int (member x and member y) with private access (because private is the default access level) and two member functions with public access: set_values() and area(), of which for now we have only included their declaration, not their definition.

Notice the difference between the class name and the object name: In the previous example, CRectangle was the class name (i.e., the type), whereas rect was an object of type CRectangle. It is the same relationship int and a have in the following declaration:

int a;

where int is the type name (the class) and a is the variable name (the object).

After the previous declarations of CRectangle and rect, we can refer within the body of the program to any of the public members of the object rect as if they were normal functions or normal variables, just by putting the object's name followed by a dot (.) and then the name of the member. All very similar to what we did with plain data structures before. For example:

rect.set_values (3,4);
myarea = rect.area();

The only members of rect that we cannot access from the body of our program outside the class are x and y, since they have private access and they can only be referred from within other members of that same class.

Here is the complete example of class CRectangle:

// classes example
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

class CRectangle {
    int x, y;
  public:
    void set_values (int,int);
    int area () {return (x*y);}
};

void CRectangle::set_values (int a, int b) {
  x = a;
  y = b;
}

int main () {
  CRectangle rect;
  rect.set_values (3,4);
  cout << "area: " << rect.area();
  return 0;
}

                     area: 12

The most important new thing in this code is the operator of scope (::, two colons) included in the definition of set_values(). It is used to define a member of a class from outside the class definition itself.

You may notice that the definition of the member function area() has been included directly within the definition of the CRectangle class given its extreme simplicity, whereas set_values() has only its prototype declared within the class, but its definition is outside it. In this outside definition, we must use the operator of scope (::) to specify that we are defining a function that is a member of the class CRectangle and not a regular global function.

The scope operator (::) specifies the class to which the member being declared belongs, granting exactly the same scope properties as if this function definition was directly included within the class definition. For example, in the function set_values() of the previous code, we have been able to use the variables x and y, which are private members of class CRectangle, which means they are only accessible from other members of their class.

The only difference between defining a class member function completely within its class or to include only the prototype and later its definition, is that in the first case the function will automatically be considered an inline member function by the compiler, while in the second it will be a normal (not-inline) class member function, which in fact supposes no difference in behavior.

Members x and y have private access (remember that if nothing else is said, all members of a class defined with keyword class have private access). By declaring them private we deny access to them from anywhere outside the class. This makes sense, since we have already defined a member function to set values for those members within the object: the member function set_values(). Therefore, the rest of the program does not need to have direct access to them. Perhaps in a so simple example as this, it is difficult to see any utility in protecting those two variables, but in greater projects it may be very important that values cannot be modified in an unexpected way (unexpected from the point of view of the object).

One of the greater advantages of a class is that, as any other type, we can declare several objects of it. For example, following with the previous example of class CRectangle, we could have declared the object rectb in addition to the object rect:

// example: one class, two objects
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

class CRectangle {
    int x, y;
  public:
    void set_values (int,int);
    int area () {return (x*y);}
};

void CRectangle::set_values (int a, int b) {
  x = a;
  y = b;
}

int main () {
  CRectangle rect, rectb;
  rect.set_values (3,4);
  rectb.set_values (5,6);
  cout << "rect area: " << rect.area() << endl;
  cout << "rectb area: " << rectb.area() << endl;
  return 0;
}

        rect area: 12
        rectb area: 30

In this concrete case, the class (type of the objects) to which we are talking about is CRectangle, of which there are two instances or objects: rect and rectb. Each one of them has its own member variables and member functions.

Notice that the call to rect.area() does not give the same result as the call to rectb.area(). This is because each object of class CRectangle has its own variables x and y, as they, in some way, have also their own function members set_value() and area() that each uses its object's own variables to operate.

That is the basic concept of object-oriented programming: Data and functions are both members of the object. We no longer use sets of global variables that we pass from one function to another as parameters, but instead we handle objects that have their own data and functions embedded as members. Notice that we have not had to give any parameters in any of the calls to rect.area or rectb.area. Those member functions directly used the data members of their respective objects rect and rectb.

OOP- An Introduction...

What is an Object?
An object can be considered a "thing" that can perform a set of related activities. The set of activities that the object performs defines the object's behavior. For example, the hand can grip something or a Student (object) can give the name or address.
In pure OOP terms an object is an instance of a class.

What is a Class?

A class is simply a representation of a type of object. It is the blueprint/ plan/ template that describe the details of an object. A class is the blueprint from which the individual objects are created. Class is composed of three things: a name, attributes, and operations.

public class Student
{
}

According to the sample given below we can say that the student object, named objectStudent, has created out of the Student class.

Student objectStudent = new Student();

In real world, you'll often find many individual objects all of the same kind. As an example, there may be thousands of other bicycles in existence, all of the same make and model. Each bicycle has built from the same blueprint. In object-oriented terms, we say that the bicycle is an instance of the class of objects known as bicycles.
In the software world, though you may not have realized it, you have already used classes. For example, the TextBox control, you always used, is made out of the TextBox class, which defines its appearance and capabilities. Each time you drag a TextBox control, you are actually creating a new instance of the TextBox class.

How to identify and design a Class?

This is an art; each designer uses different techniques to identify classes. However according to Object Oriented Design Principles, there are five principles that you must follow when design a class,

SRP - The Single Responsibility Principle -
A class should have one, and only one, reason to change.
OCP - The Open Closed Principle -
You should be able to extend a classes behavior, without modifying it.
LSP - The Liskov Substitution Principle-
Derived classes must be substitutable for their base classes.
DIP - The Dependency Inversion Principle-
Depend on abstractions, not on concretions.
ISP - The Interface Segregation Principle-
Make fine grained interfaces that are client specific.

For more information on design principles, please refer to Object Mentor.
Additionally to identify a class correctly, you need to identify the full list of leaf level functions/ operations of the system (granular level use cases of the system). Then you can proceed to group each function to form classes (classes will group same types of functions/ operations). However a well defined class must be a meaningful grouping of a set of functions and should support the re-usability while increasing expandability/ maintainability of the overall system.
In software world the concept of dividing and conquering is always recommended, if you start analyzing a full system at the start, you will find it harder to manage. So the better approach is to identify the module of the system first and then dig deep in to each module separately to seek out classes.
A software system may consist of many classes. But in any case, when you have many, it needs to be managed. Think of a big organization, with its work force exceeding several thousand employees (let’s take one employee as a one class). In order to manage such a work force, you need to have proper management policies in place. Same technique can be applies to manage classes of your software system as well. In order to manage the classes of a software system, and to reduce the complexity, the system designers use several techniques, which can be grouped under four main concepts named Encapsulation, Abstraction, Inheritance, and Polymorphism. These concepts are the four main gods of OOP world and in software term, they are called four main Object Oriented Programming (OOP) Concepts.

What is Encapsulation?

The encapsulation is the inclusion within a program object of all the resources need for the object to function - basically, the methods and the data. In OOP the encapsulation is mainly achieved by creating classes, the classes expose public methods and properties. The class is kind of a container or capsule or a cell, which encapsulate the set of methods, attribute and properties to provide its indented functionalities to other classes. In that sense, encapsulation also allows a class to change its internal implementation without hurting the overall functioning of the system. That idea of encapsulation is to hide how a class does it but to allow requesting what to do.

In order to modularize/ define the functionality of a one class, that class can uses functions/ properties exposed by another class in many different ways. According to Object Oriented Programming there are several techniques, classes can use to link with each other and they are named association, aggregation, and composition.
There are several other ways that an encapsulation can be used, as an example we can take the usage of an interface. The interface can be used to hide the information of an implemented class.

IStudent myStudent = new LocalStudent();
IStudent myStudent = new ForeignStudent();

According to the sample above (let’s assume that LocalStudent and ForeignStudent are implemented by the IStudent interface) we can see how LocalStudent and ForeignStudent are hiding their, localize implementing information through the IStudent interface.

What is Association?

Association is a (*a*) relationship between two classes. It allows one object instance to cause another to perform an action on its behalf. Association is the more general term that define the relationship between two classes, where as the aggregation and composition are relatively special.

public class StudentRegistrar
{
    public StudentRegistrar ();
    {
        new RecordManager().Initialize();
    }
}

In this case we can say that there is an association between StudentRegistrar and RecordManager or there is a directional association from StudentRegistrar to RecordManager or StudentRegistrar use a (*Use*) RecordManager. Since a direction is explicitly specified, in this case the controller class is the StudentRegistrar.

To some beginners, association is a confusing concept. The troubles created not only by the association alone, but with two other OOP concepts, that is association, aggregation and composition. Every one understands association, before aggregation and composition are described. The aggregation or composition cannot be separately understood. If you understand the aggregation alone it will crack the definition given for association, and if you try to understand the composition alone it will always threaten the definition given for aggregation, all three concepts are closely related, hence must study together, by comparing one definition to another. Let’s explore all three and see whether we can understand the differences between these useful concepts.

What is an Interface?

In summary the Interface separates the implementation and defines the structure, and this concept is very useful in cases where you need the implementation to be interchangeable. Apart from that an interface is very useful when the implementation changes frequently. Some say you should define all classes in terms of interfaces, but I think recommendation seems a bit extreme.
Interface can be used to define a generic template and then one or more abstract classes to define partial implementations of the interface. Interfaces just specify the method declaration (implicitly public and abstract) and can contain properties (which are also implicitly public and abstract). Interface definition begins with the keyword interface. An interface like that of an abstract class cannot be instantiated.
If a class that implements an interface does not define all the methods of the interface, then it must be declared abstract and the method definitions must be provided by the subclass that extends the abstract class. In addition to this an interfaces can inherit other interfaces.
The sample below will provide an interface for our LoggerBase abstract class.

public interface ILogger
{
    bool IsThisLogError { get; }
}

What is Inheritance?

Ability of a new class to be created, from an existing class by extending it, is called inheritance.

public class Exception
{
}


public class IOException : Exception
{
}

According to the above example the new class (IOException), which is called the derived class or subclass, inherits the members of an existing class (Exception), which is called the base class or super-class. The class IOException can extend the functionality of the class Exception by adding new types and methods and by overriding existing ones.
Just like abstraction is closely related with generalization, the inheritance is closely related with specialization. It is important to discuss those two concepts together with generalization to better understand and to reduce the complexity.
One of the most important relationships among objects in the real world is specialization, which can be described as the “is-a” relationship. When we say that a dog is a mammal, we mean that the dog is a specialized kind of mammal. It has all the characteristics of any mammal (it bears live young, nurses with milk, has hair), but it specializes these characteristics to the familiar characteristics of canis domesticus. A cat is also a mammal. As such, we expect it to share certain characteristics with the dog that are generalized in Mammal, but to differ in those characteristics that are specialized in cats.
The specialization and generalization relationships are both reciprocal and hierarchical. Specialization is just the other side of the generalization coin: Mammal generalizes what is common between dogs and cats, and dogs and cats specialize mammals to their own specific subtypes.
Similarly, as an example you can say that both IOException and SecurityException are of type Exception. They have all characteristics and behaviors of an Exception, That mean the IOException is a specialized kind of Exception. A SecurityException is also an Exception. As such, we expect it to share certain characteristic with IOException that are generalized in Exception, but to differ in those characteristics that are specialized in SecurityExceptions. In other words, Exception generalizes the shared characteristics of both IOException and SecurityException, while IOException and SecurityException specialize with their characteristics and behaviors.
In OOP, the specialization relationship is implemented using the principle called inheritance. This is the most common and most natural and widely accepted way of implement this relationship.

What is Polymorphisms?

Polymorphisms is a generic term that means 'many shapes'. More precisely Polymorphisms means the ability to request that the same operations be performed by a wide range of different types of things.
At times, I used to think that understanding Object Oriented Programming concepts have made it difficult since they have grouped under four main concepts, while each concept is closely related with one another. Hence one has to be extremely careful to correctly understand each concept separately, while understanding the way each related with other concepts.
In OOP the polymorphisms is achieved by using many different techniques named method overloading, operator overloading and method overriding,

What is OOP?

OOP is a design philosophy. It stands for Object Oriented Programming. Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) uses a different set of programming languages than old procedural programming languages (C, Pascal, etc.).
Everything in OOP is grouped as self sustainable "objects". Hence, you gain re-usability by means of four main object-oriented programming concepts.

In order to clearly understand the object orientation, let’s take your “hand” as an example. The “hand” is a class. Your body has two objects of type hand, named left hand and right hand. Their main functions are controlled/ managed by a set of electrical signals sent through your shoulders (through an interface). So the shoulder is an interface which your body uses to interact with your hands. The hand is a well architected class. The hand is being re-used to create the left hand and the right hand by slightly changing the properties of it.

Saturday, 10 March 2012

Switch Structure:

The syntax of the switch statement is a bit peculiar. Its objective is to check several possible constant values for an expression. Something similar to what we did at the beginning of this section with the concatenation of several if and else if instructions. Its form is the following:

switch (expression)
{
  case constant1:
     group of statements 1;
     break;
  case constant2:
     group of statements 2;
     break;
  .
  .
  .
  default:
     default group of statements
}

It works in the following way: switch evaluates expression and checks if it is equivalent to constant1, if it is, it executes group of statements 1 until it finds the break statement. When it finds this break statement the program jumps to the end of the switch selective structure.

If expression was not equal to constant1 it will be checked against constant2. If it is equal to this, it will execute group of statements 2 until a break keyword is found, and then will jump to the end of the switch selective structure.

And if the value of expression did not match any of the previously specified constants (you can include as many case labels as values you want to check), the program will execute the statements included after the default: label, if it exists (since it is optional).

Both of the following code fragments have the same behavior:

switch example	if-else equivalent
switch (x) { case 1: cout << "x is 1"; break; case 2: cout << "x is 2"; break; default: cout << "value of x unknown"; }	if (x == 1) { cout << "x is 1"; } else if (x == 2) { cout << "x is 2"; } else { cout << "value of x unknown"; }

switch example

if-else equivalent

  switch (x) {
    case 1:
      cout << "x is 1";
      break;
    case 2:
      cout << "x is 2";
      break;
    default:
      cout << "value of x unknown";
   }

       if (x == 1) {
          cout << "x is 1";
       }
       else if (x == 2) {
          cout << "x is 2";
       }
       else {
          cout << "value of x unknown";
       }

The switch statement is a bit peculiar within the C++ language because it uses labels instead of blocks. This forces us to put break statements after the group of statements that we want to be executed for a specific condition. Otherwise the remainder statements -including those corresponding to other labels- will also be executed until the end of the switch selective block or a break statement is reached.

For example, if we did not include a break statement after the first group for case one, the program will not automatically jump to the end of the switch selective block and it would continue executing the rest of statements until it reaches either a break instruction or the end of the switch selective block. This makes it unnecessary to include braces { } surrounding the statements for each of the cases, and it can also be useful to execute the same block of instructions for different possible values for the expression being evaluated. For example:

switch (x) {
  case 1:
  case 2:
  case 3:
    cout << "x is 1, 2 or 3";
    break;
  default:
    cout << "x is not 1, 2 nor 3";
  }

The switch can only be used to compare an expression against constants. Therefore we cannot put variables as labels (for example case n: where n is a variable) or ranges (case (1..3):) because they are not valid C++ constants.

If you need to check ranges or values that are not constants, use a concatenation of if and else if statements.

if else Practise...

Q # 1: The LeVan Car Rental company charges $0.25/mile if the total mileage does not exceed 100. If the total mileage is over 100, the company charges $0.25/mile for the first 100 miles, then it charges $0.15/mile for any additional mileage over 100.

Write a program so that if the clerk enters the number of miles, the program would display the total price owed.

solution of above question....

#include<iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
double milage,price,pricemorethan100,rate,milagemorethan100;
cout<<"Enter the Milage = ";
cin>>milage;
if(milage<=100)
{
price = milage * 0.25;
cout<<"The Gasolone bill is = $ "<<price<<endl;
}
else if(milage>100)
{
milagemorethan100 = milage - 100;
pricemorethan100 = milagemorethan100 * 0.15;
price = 100 * 0.25;
rate = price + pricemorethan100;
cout<<"The gasoline bill is = $ "<<rate<<endl;
}
return 0;
}
____________________________________________________________________________
Q # 2: Find maximum of three numbers...

The solution is:

#include<iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
int n1,n2,n3;
cout<<"Enter three Numbers ";
cin>>n1>>n2>>n3;
if(n1 > n2 && n1 > n3)
{
cout<<" Number1 is Maximum"<<endl;
}
else if(n2 > n1 && n2 > n3)
{
cout<<" Number2 is Maximum"<<endl;
}
else if(n3 > n2 && n3 > n1)
{
cout<<"Number3 is Maximum"<<endl;
}
else if(n1==n2 && n1>n3)
{
cout<<"number 1 and number 2 are equal but greater than number3."<<endl;
}
else if(n2==n3 && n2>n1)
{
cout<<"number 2 and number 3 are equal but greater than number1."<<endl;
}
else if(n3==n1 && n3>n2)
{
cout<<"number 1 and number 3 are equal but greater than number2."<<endl;
}
else
{
cout<<"all three numbers are equal"<<endl;
}
return 0;
}

_______________________________________________________________________________

Q # 3: Make a basic calculator using else if:

Solution:

#include<iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
    int n1,n2;
    char operation;
    cout<<"Enter two numbers";
    cin>>n1>>n2;
    cout<<"Enter Operation = ";
    cin>>operation;
    if(operation=='+')
    {
    cout<"Addition"<<n1+n2<<endl;
    }
    else if(operation=='-')
    {
    cout<<"Subtraction"<<n1-n2<<endl;
    }
    else if(operation=='*')
    {
    cout<<"Multiplication"<<n1*n2<<endl;
    }
    else if(operation=='/')
    {
    cout<<"Division"<<static_cast<double>(n1) / (n2)<<endl;
    }
    else if(operation=='%')
    {
    cout<<"Modulus"<<n1%n2<<endl;
    }
    else    cout<<"Invalid Value"<<endl;
return 0;
}

Control Structures in c++

A program is usually not limited to a linear sequence of instructions. During its process it may need to take decisions. For that purpose, C++ provides control structures that serve to specify what has to be done by our program, when and under which circumstances.

With the introduction of control structures we have a concept of the compound-statement or block. A block is a group of statements which are separated by semicolons (;) like all C++ statements, but grouped together in a block enclosed in braces: { }:

{ statement1; statement2; statement3; }
Most of the control structures that we will see in this section require a generic statement as part of its syntax. A statement can be either a simple statement (a simple instruction ending with a semicolon) or a compound statement (several instructions grouped in a block), like the one just described. In the case that we want the statement to be a simple statement, we do not need to enclose it in braces ({}). But in the case that we want the statement to be a compound statement it must be enclosed between braces ({}), forming a block.

Conditional structure:

if and else:

Simple If:
The if keyword is used to execute a statement or block only if a condition is fulfilled. Its form is:

if (condition) statement
Where condition is the expression that is being evaluated. If this condition is true, statement is executed. If it is false, statement is ignored (not executed) and the program continues right after this conditional structure.
For example, the following code fragment prints x is 10 only if the value stored in the x variable is indeed 10:

if (x == 10)
  cout << "x is 10";

If we want more than a single statement to be executed in case that the condition is true we can specify a block using braces { }:

if (x == 100)

{
   cout << "x is ";
   cout << x;
}

If else:
We can additionally specify what we want to happen if the condition is not fulfilled by using the keyword else. Its form used in conjunction with if is:

if (condition) statement1 else statement2For example:

if (x == 10)
  cout << "x is 10";
else
  cout << "x is not 10";

prints on the screen x is 10 if indeed x has a value of 10, but if it has any other vaue, it prints out x is not 10.

Multiple else if:

The if + else structures can be concatenated with the intention of verifying a range of values. The following example shows its use telling if the value currently stored in x is positive, negative or none of them (i.e. zero):

if (x > 0)
  cout << "x is positive";
else if (x < 0)
  cout << "x is negative";

else
  cout << "x is 0";

Remember that in case that we want more than a single statement to be executed, we must group them in a block by enclosing them in braces { }.

another substitute of multiple else if is Nested if. i.e if into the block of another if and if else can also b nested either in the block of if or in the block of if else.