June 2010
Intermediate to advanced
456 pages
14h 48m
English
Much good software can be written by using classes, primitive types, and functions. Classes and functions parameterized with types and values make things even better. But oftentimes it becomes painfully obvious that classes are not the ultimate type abstraction device, for a few reasons.
First, classes obey reference semantics, which may force them to represent many designs poorly and with considerable overhead. An entity as simple as a Point with 2-D or 3-D coordinates becomes practically difficult to model with a class if there are more than a few million of them, which puts the designer in the dreaded position of choosing between good abstraction and reasonable efficiency. Also, in linear algebra, aliasing ...