- C++ can throw any type whatsoever, it doesn't have to be an exception (soon you might see an int hurtling over your head!)
- If you are doing exception handling in C++, you should always throw by value and catch by reference. Catching it by value leads to 2 copies (ugly) and catching it by pointer means you have to throw a pointer and that can lead to all sorts of memory management hell.
- Stack allocation is faster than heap allocation, so avoid using the new operator if you can.
- Wondering what the differences between references and pointers are? Well one is that you can always declare a pointer variable uninitialized and it's OK to reassign them to different variables. References NEED to be initialized to some variable, and like swans - they mate for life.
- Finally in Java, (I know this but tend to ignore it while programming) use StringBuilder when repeatedly concatenating Strings, since doing something like str1 += str2 causes a new String to be built and assigned to str1 while its older value is garbage collected (they're immutable, remember)
We also started on the UVa Australian Voting problem. The logic seems pretty straightforward, once you're past the reading/ writing issues. More on that next week.
