Essential C++

1.6. Pointers Allow for Flexibility

Our display solution in the preceding section has two primary drawbacks. First, it has a fixed upper limit of six sequences; if the user should guess all six sequences, the program unexpectedly terminates. Second, it always displays the same six element pairs in the same order. How might we extend our program’s flexibility?

One possible solution is to maintain six vectors, one for each sequence, calculated to some number of elements. With each iteration of the loop, we draw our element pair from a different vector. When using a vector a second time, we draw our element pair from a different index within the vector. This approach resolves both drawbacks.

As with our earlier solution, we’d like to access the ...