Hardcore Programming for Mechanical Engineers

17READING INPUT FROM A FILE

Any engineering application we develop will require some data input. For example, to solve a truss structure using the algorithm we developed in the previous chapter, we first need to construct the structure model. It’d be tedious to manually instantiate the classes to construct the model every time we want to solve a structure; it’d be more convenient to simply pass our app a plaintext file that follows a given and well-defined scheme defining the structure we want to solve. In this chapter, we’ll equip our app with a file parser function that reads text files, interprets them, and constructs the model that the app ...