Chapter 18Vectors and Arrays.ppt

* * Why bother with arrays? It’s all that C has In particular, C does not have vector There is a lot of C code “out there” Here “a lot” means N*1B lines There is a lot of C++ code in C style “out there” Here “a lot” means N*100M lines You’ll eventually encounter code full of arrays and pointers They represent primitive memory in C++ programs We need them (mostly on free store allocated by new) to implement better container types Avoid arrays whenever you can They are the largest single source of bugs in C and (unnecessarily) in C++ programs They are among the largest sources of security violations, usually (avoidable) buffer overflows * Stroustrup/Programming Types of memory vector glob(10); // global vector – “lives” forever vector* some_fct(int n) { vector v(n); // local vector – “lives” until the end of scope vector* p = new vector(n); // free-store vector – “lives” until we delete it // … return p; } void f() { vector* pp = some_fct(17); // … delete pp; // deallocate the free-store vector allocated in some_fct() } it’s easy to forget to delete free-store allocated objects so avoid new/delete when you can (and that’s most of the time) * Stroustrup/Programming Vector (primitive access) // a very simplified vector of doubles: vector v(10); for (int i=0; iv.size(); ++i) { // pretty ugly: v.set(i,i); cout v.get(i); } for (int i=0; iv.size(); ++i) { // we’re used to this: v[i]=i; cout v[i]; } * 1.0 2.0 3.0 4.0 5.0 6.0 7.0 8.0 0.0 9.0 10 Stroustrup/Programming Vector (we could use pointers for access) // a very simplified vector of doubles: class vector { int sz; // the size double* elem; // pointer to elements public: explicit vector(int s) :sz{s}, elem{new double[s]} { } // constructor // … double* operator[ ](int n) { return elem[n]; } // access: return pointer }; vector v(10); for (int i=0; iv.size(); ++i) { // works, but still too ugly: *v[i] = i; // means *(v[i]), that is, return a pointer to // the ith e