C++ In a Nutshell

Type Declarations

One of the hallmarks of C++ is that you can define a type that resembles any built-in type. Thus, if you need to define a type that supports arbitrary-sized integers—call it bigint—you can do so, and programmers will be able to use bigint objects the same way they use int objects.

You can define a brand new type by defining a class (see Chapter 6) or an enumeration (see Section 2.5.2 later in this chapter). In addition to declaring and defining new types, you can declare a typedef, which is a synonym for an existing type. Note that while the name typedef seems to be a shorthand for “type definition,” it is actually a type declaration. (See Section 2.5.4 later in this chapter.)

Fundamental Types

This section lists the fundamental type specifiers that are built into the C++ language. For types that require multiple keywords (e.g., unsigned long int), you can mix the keywords in any order, but the order shown in the following list is the conventional order. If a type specifier requires multiple words, one of which is int, the int can be omitted. If a type is signed, the signed keyword can be omitted (except in the case of signed char).

bool

Represents a Boolean or logical value. It has two possible values: true and false.

char

Represents a narrow character. Narrow character literals usually have type char. (If a narrow character literal contains multiple characters, the ...