Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++, 2nd Edition

7. Completing a Program

“It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.”

—Opera proverb

Writing a program involves gradually refining your ideas of what you want to do and how you want to express it. In Chapter 6, we produced the initial working version of a calculator program. Here, we’ll refine it. Completing the program — that is, making it fit for users and maintainers — involves improving the user interface, doing some serious work on error handling, adding a few useful features, and restructuring the code for ease of understanding and modification.

7.1 Introduction

7.2 Input and output

7.3 Error handling

7.4 Negative numbers

7.5 Remainder: %

7.6 Cleaning up the code

7.6.1 Symbolic constants

7.6.2 Use of functions

7.6.3 Code layout

7.6.4 Commenting ...