Mastering Algorithms with C

A Bit About Software Engineering

As mentioned at the start of this chapter, a good understanding of data structures and algorithms is an important part of developing well-crafted software. Equally important is a dedication to applying sound practices in software engineering in our implementations. Software engineering is a broad subject, but a great deal can be gleaned from a few concepts, which are presented here and applied throughout the examples in this book.

Modularity

One way to achieve modularity in software design is to focus on the development of black boxes. In software, a black box is a module whose internals are not intended to be seen by users of the module. Users interact with the module only through a prescribed interface made public by its creator. That is, the creator publicizes only what users need to know to use the module and hides the details about everything else. Consequently, users are not concerned with the details of how the module is implemented and are prevented (at least in policy, depending on the language) from working with the module’s internals. These ideas are fundamental to data hiding and encapsulation, principles of good software engineering enforced particularly well by object-oriented languages. Although languages that are not object-oriented do not enforce these ideas to the same degree, we can still apply them. One example in this book is the design of abstract datatypes. Fundamentally, each datatype is a structure. Exactly what one can do ...