#12 April 15th

The final project has been announced - it's the famous Conway's game of Life. It would be interesting to have glider guns as one of the input cases. It's also interesting to have another evolutionary-style project handed to us after Darwin. This one again, is solidly suited for object-oriented design and I suspect the first half of the semester was prepping us to get comfortable with the eccentricities of C++ so that we could tackle these with a lot of tools under our belts. This one also makes use of abstract classes and inheritance to reuse code, something which I have wanted to hone - and even if it's just one project, I appreciate that this is being thrown at us as part of the problem. I'm really looking forward to solving this one, but I need to get hold of a partner first! So, more on "Life experiences" later.

As for the material covered this week - we went through copy assignment in Java and C++ using a Complex class example. We also started on inheritance. Some of the interesting things that came out of this week's lectures are:

• In a constructor's initialization list, the order of variables is immaterial. Initialization of variables occurs in the order that the variables have been declared in the class.
• You can access private members of an object if it is the same type as yourself.
• A non-static const method CAN modify static data
• delete 0 is well defined to do nothing
• The Rule of Three comes in to the picture when you're writing a class that has to perform explicit memory management (say you're writing the vector class and need to manage the underlying array). It states that: "If you need to explicitly declare either the destructor, copy constructor or copy assignment operator yourself, you probably need to explicitly declare all three of them." Something important to keep in mind! See this StackOverflow article for the full story on copying objects.