weird token names?
closed account (Dy7SLyTq)
so this is a serious post (not like my http://www.cplusplus.com/forum/lounge/107706/ post). i was wondering why they used some of the names they did for c++ or oop in general.
virtual, class, curses (which i know is a header but still), explicit, friend, and stuff like that. btw im not arguing the usefullness of these features, but just wondering why they are called what they are
virtual, class, curses (which i know is a header but still), explicit, friend, and stuff like that. btw im not arguing the usefullness of these features, but just wondering why they are called what they are
I think most of these are terms that apply to programming languages in general, not just C++.
I'd think that they are trying to keep them as short as possible.
a virtual function doesn't make too much sense in a natural language...
a virtual function doesn't make too much sense in a natural language...
* class - another name for type (classes in OOP are user-defined types): a class of items,
* curses - a library for managing terminals. I suspect it's named that because terminals have cursors and are annoying to manage. Cursor + annoying ("Curses!") => curses.
* explicit - should be pretty obvious. Explicit is the opposite of implicit, so what is implicitly implicit can be explicitly made explicit.
* friend - classes can have parents (base classes), children (derived classes) and, I guess, siblings (classes with the same parents) and spouses (classes who act as base classes for the same derived class(es)), so why not friends? Someone ("they") wanted a way to allow selective outside access to private members so that we could have class members that were hidden from the general public but
* virtual - pure virtual functions are functions that aren't defined (for the base class), i.e. aren't real. Another word for "not real" is virtual. For non-pure-virtual functions though, it doesn't really make sense.
Any more?
* curses - a library for managing terminals. I suspect it's named that because terminals have cursors and are annoying to manage. Cursor + annoying ("Curses!") => curses.
* explicit - should be pretty obvious. Explicit is the opposite of implicit, so what is implicitly implicit can be explicitly made explicit.
* friend - classes can have parents (base classes), children (derived classes) and, I guess, siblings (classes with the same parents) and spouses (classes who act as base classes for the same derived class(es)), so why not friends? Someone ("they") wanted a way to allow selective outside access to private members so that we could have class members that were hidden from the general public but
* virtual - pure virtual functions are functions that aren't defined (for the base class), i.e. aren't real. Another word for "not real" is virtual. For non-pure-virtual functions though, it doesn't really make sense.
Any more?
closed account (Dy7SLyTq)
thanks chrisname. idk why i put explicit up there. although just side note, i wasnt asking about how they worked :p
What annoys me is that we pass variables by address with an ampersand while the at symbol (@) remains completely unused.
Yeah, I think it makes more grammatical sense then "p is and i". But then again I've never seen either symbol used outside of American English so I don't know how it comes off in other languages.
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