C++ Primer Plus

Classes in C++

A class is a C++ vehicle for translating an abstraction to a user-defined type. It combines data representation and methods for manipulating that data into one neat package. Let’s look at a class that represents stocks.

First, you have to think a bit about how to represent stocks. You could take one share of stock as the basic unit and define a class to represent a share. However, that implies that you would need 100 objects to represent 100 shares, and that’s not practical. Instead, you can represent a person’s current holdings in a particular stock as a basic unit. The number of shares owned would be part of the data representation. A realistic approach would have to maintain records of such things as initial purchase price and ...