A Tour of C++, 3rd Edition

3

Modularity

Mind your own business.

– Traditional

• Introduction

• Separate Compilation

  Header Files; Modules

• Namespaces

• Function Arguments and Return Values

  Argument Passing; Value Return; Return Type Deduction; Suffix Return Type; Structured Binding

• Advice

3.1 Introduction

A C++ program consists of many separately developed parts, such as functions (§1.2.1), user-defined types (Chapter 2), class hierarchies (§5.5), and templates (Chapter 7). The key to managing such a multitude of parts is to clearly define the interactions among those parts. The first and most important step is to distinguish between the interface to a part and its implementation. At the language level, C++ represents interfaces by declarations. A declaration specifies all ...