Learning to Program in C++

Review

The most important concept in this chapter is the idea of creating user defined data types. In C++, this is done by defining a class for each such data type. Each class has both a class interface, which describes the behavior that the class displays to the "outside world" (i.e., other, unrelated functions), and a class implementation, which tells the compiler how to perform the behaviors promised in the interface definition. A variable of a class type is called an object. With proper attention to the interface and the details of implementation, it is possible to make objects behave just like native variables; that is, they can be initialized, assigned, compared, passed as function arguments, and returned as function return values.

Both ...