#7 Mar 11

Well this was a slow week in the OOP class. Most of this week was spent discussing the ins and outs of arrays in C++. How we can only use it as a pointer when passed as a functional argument, how you can dynamically initialize them with values, but cannot initialize them with the same syntactic sweetness as int i = j. The same thing goes for when you're trying to reassign an array tonanother array. Something as simple yet dumb as a = b where a and b are arrays can actually cause a memory leak if you have created a on the heap. So it all boils down to use vectors - they are a part of the standard template library, they provide the syntactic sugar which lets you handle them very nearly like built-in types and are also blazingly fast about it. But what personally tilts the balance in favor of vectors is the fact that they handle all memory management on their own under the covers, so the chances of having a memory leak are now very low as compared to when we were using arrays.

This also brings us to our first really Object Oriented project for the semester. We're basically given a bunch of scores for students in a course and are expected to compute the statistics on it. While honestly this doesn't really need an object oriented approach to solve it I can still see why making a Student object might be helpful - especially is this were to go on to become part of a more complex system. The getters and setters are evil ideology makes a lot of sense once you think about it, and also brings up the question - how do you come up with a good design. In my case, I'm keeping most of the statistical functionality with the Course class and only personal stuff like ID and individual scores with the Student. Of course, this means that student objects will have to pass over their vector of scores to the course object, but I could not see a way around this minimal message passing. This project also made me realize how much I like Python :)