Object Oriented Programming using C++

By: Mohamed Gafar Elnourani Email: [email protected] elnourani83@yahoo com Mobile: 0911471315

Course Informations

Reference Object-Oriented Programming in C++, Fourth Edition, Robert Lafore.

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Why Do We Need Object ObjectOriented Programming?

Object-oriented j programming p g g was developed because limitations were discovered in earlier approaches pp to programming. To appreciate pp what OOP does, , we need to understand what these limitations are and how they y arose from traditional programming languages.

Procedural Languages

C, Pascal, FORTRAN, and similar languages are procedural p oced al languages. la a es Each statement in the language tells the computer to do something. A program in a procedural language is a list of instructions. For very small programs, no other organizing principle is needed. The programmer creates the list of instructions, and the computer carries them out.

Division into Functions

When programs become larger, a single list of i instructions i b becomes unwieldy. i ld Few programmers can comprehend a program of more than a few hundred statements unless it is broken down into smaller units. For this reason the function was adopted as a way to make programs more comprehensible to their human creators. A procedural program is divided into functions, functions and (ideally, at least) each function has a clearly defined purpose and a clearly defined interface to the h other h functions f i in i the h program.

Problems with Structured Programming

As programs grow ever larger and more complex, even the structured programming approach begins to show signs of strain. Analyzing the reasons for these failures reveals that there are weaknesses in the procedural paradigm itself. No matter how well the structured programming approach is implemented, large programs become excessively complex. There are two related problems. First, functions have unrestricted access to global data. Second, unrelated functions and data, the basis of the procedural paradigm, provide a poor model of the real world.

Unrestricted Access

In a procedural program, there are two kinds of data. Local data is hidden hidde inside i side a function, f ctio and a d is used sed exclusively by the function. In the inventory program a display function might use local data to remember which item it was displaying displaying. Local data is closely related to its function and is safe from modification by other functions. However when two or more functions must access However, the same data, and this is true of the most important data in a program, then the data must be made global, as our collection of inventory items is. Global data can be accessed by any function in the program.

Unrestricted Access (cont.)

Unrestricted Access (cont.)

In a large program, there are many functions and many global data items. items The problem with the procedural paradigm is that this leads to an even larger number of potential connections between functions and data. data This large number of connections causes problems in several ways. Fi First, i it makes k a programs structure difficult diffi l to conceptualize. Second, it makes the program difficult to modify. (A change h made d in i a global l b l data d item i may necessitate rewriting all the functions that access that item)

RealReal -World Modeling

The arrangement of separate data and functions does a poor job of modeling things in the real world. In the physical world we deal with objects such as people and cars. Such objects arent like data and they arent like functions. Complex realworld objects have both attributes and behavior. A ib Attributes Attributes in the real world are equivalent to data in a program: they have a certain specific values, such as blue (for eye color) or four (for the number of doors). Behavior Behavior is something a real-world object does in response to some stimulus. Behavior is like a function: you call a f function i to d do something hi and d it i does d it. i So neither data nor functions, by themselves, model realworld objects effectively.

The Object Object-Oriented Approach

The fundamental idea behind objectj oriented languages is to combine into a single g unit both data and the functions that operate on that data. Such c a unit t is sc called ed an object.

The ObjectObject-Oriented Approach (cont.)

Characteristics of ObjectObject-Oriented Languages

Objects j Classes Inheritance Reusability Creating C i New N Data D Types T Polymorphism and Overloading

Objects

When you approach a programming problem in an object-oriented language, you no longer ask how the problem will be divided into functions, functions but how it will be divided into objects. Thinking in terms of objects, rather than functions, has a surprisingly helpful effect on how easily programs can be designed. This results from the close match between objects in the programming sense and objects bj i in the h real l world. ld

Classes

In OOP we say that objects are members of classes. Defining the class doesnt create any objects, j t as th just the mere existence it of f data d t type t i t int doesnt create any variables. A class is thus a description of a number of similar objects. This fits our non-technical understanding g of the word class. An object is often called an instance of a class.

Inheritance

The idea of classes leads to the idea of inheritance. In our daily lives, we use the concept of classes divided into subclasses. The principle in this sort of division is that each subclass shares common characteristics with the class from which its derived. In addition to the characteristics shared with other members of the class, each subclass also has its own particular characteristics. In a similar way, an OOP class can become a parent of several subclasses. In C++ the original class is called the base class; other classes can be defined that share its characteristics, but add their own as well. These are called derived classes. Objects, which exist in the computers memory, each embody the exact characteristics of their class, which serves as a template. Derived classes inherit some characteristics from their base class, but add new ones of their own. I h i Inheritance is i somewhat h analogous l to using i f functions i to simplify i lif a traditional procedural program. As functions do in a procedural program, inheritance shortens an objectoriented program and clarifies the relationship among program elements.

Inheritance (cont.)

Reusability

Once a class has been written, created, and debugged, it can be distributed to other programmers for use in their own programs. This is called reusability. It is similar to the way a library of functions in a procedural language can be incorporated into different programs. H However, in i OOP, OOP the h concept of f inheritance i h i provides id an important extension to the idea of reusability. A programmer can take an existing class and, without modifying it, add additional features and capabilities to it. This is done by deriving a new class from the existing one. The new class will inherit the capabilities of the old one, but is free to add new features of its own. Th ease with The i h which hi h existing i i software f can b be reused d is i an important benefit of OOP. Many companies find that being able to reuse classes on a second project provides an increased return on their original g programming p g g investment.

Creating New Data Types

One of the benefits of objects is that they give the programmer a convenient way to construct new data types. Suppose you work with two-dimensional positions (such as x and y coordinates, or latitude and longitude) in your program.You would like to express operations on these positional values with normal arithmetic operations, operations such as position1 = position2 + origin where the variables position1, position2, and origin each represent a pair of independent numerical quantities. By creating a class that incorporates these two values, and declaring position1, position2, and origin to be objects of this class, we can, in effect, create a new data type. Many features of C++ are intended to facilitate the creation of new data types in this manner.

Polymorphism and Overloading

Note that the = (equal) and + (plus) operators, used in the position arithmetic shown above, dont don t act the same way they do in operations on built-in types such as int. The objects position1 and so on are not predefined in C++, but are programmer-defined objects of class Position. H How do d the h = and d + operators know k how h to operate on objects? The answer is that we can define new behaviors for these operators. These operations will be member functions of the Position class. Using operators or functions in different ways, depending on what they are operating on, is called polymorphism (one thing with several distinct forms).When an existing operator, such as + or =, is i given i the h capability bili to operate on a new data d type, it i is said to be overloaded. Overloading is a kind of polymorphism; it is also an important feature of OOP. OOP

C++ and C

The Unified Modeling Language (UML)

The UML is a graphical language for modeling computer programs. Modeling means to create a simplified representation of something. The UML provides id a way to visualize i li the h higher-level hi h l l organization i i of f programs without getting mired down in the details of actual code. Why do we need the UML? One reason is that in a large computer program its often hard to understand, simply by looking at the code, how th parts the t of f th the program relate l t t to each h other. th The most important part of the UML is a set of different kinds of diagrams. Class diagrams show the relationships among classes, object diagrams show how specific objects relate, sequence diagrams show the communication among objects over time time, use case diagrams show how a programs users interact with the program, and so on. These diagrams provide a variety of ways to look at a program and its operation. UML is useful throughout all phases of software development, from initial specification to documentation, documentation testing, testing and maintenance. maintenance The UML is simply a way to look at the software being developed. Although it can be applied to any kind of programming language, the UML is especially attuned to OOP.