What is this idiom and when should it be used? Which problems does it solve? Does the idiom change when C++11 is used? Although it’s been mentioned in many places, we didn’t have any singular “what is it” question and answer, so here it is. Here is a partial list of places where it was … Read more
Note: The answers were given in a specific order, but since many users sort answers according to votes, rather than the time they were given, here’s an index of the answers in the order in which they make the most sense: The General Syntax of operator overloading in C++ The Three Basic Rules of Operator … Read more
What does copying an object mean? What are the copy constructor and the copy assignment operator? When do I need to declare them myself? How can I prevent my objects from being copied? 8 Introduction C++ treats variables of user-defined types with value semantics. This means that objects are implicitly copied in various contexts, and … Read more
What are the proper uses of: static_cast dynamic_cast const_cast reinterpret_cast C-style cast (type)value Function-style cast type(value) How does one decide which to use in which specific cases? 9 static_cast is the first cast you should attempt to use. It does things like implicit conversions between types (such as int to float, or pointer to void*), … Read more
I’ve been told by others that writing using namespace std; in code is wrong, and that I should use std::cout and std::cin directly instead. Why is using namespace std; considered a bad practice? Is it inefficient or does it risk declaring ambiguous variables (variables that share the same name as a function in std namespace)? … Read more
What does the explicit keyword mean in C++? 10 The compiler is allowed to make one implicit conversion to resolve the parameters to a function. What this means is that the compiler can use constructors callable with a single parameter to convert from one type to another in order to get the right type for … Read more
I know references are syntactic sugar, so code is easier to read and write. But what is the difference between a pointer variable and a reference variable? 4 42
This question’s answers are a community effort. Edit existing answers to improve this post. It is not currently accepting new answers or interactions. This question attempts to collect the few pearls among the dozens of bad C++ books that are published every year. Unlike many other programming languages, which are often picked up on the … Read more
