“In human
affairs we have reached a point where the problems that we must solve are no
longer solvable without the aid of computers. I fear not computers but the lack
of them”
-Issac Asimov
Computers
are machines that can help us solve complex scientific, business and
administrative problems. They have helped automation of many industrial and
business systems. However, we must remember that they are machines, created and
managed by men. They have no brain of their own. Anything they do is the result
of human instructions. They carry out the instructions obediently as long as
the instructions can be executed using the available hardware, no matter
whether they are right or wrong. That is, computers lack common sense.
Computers need clear instructions to tell them what
to do, how to do, and when to do. The way of providing such instructions to
computers is called programming. The language used in construction and communication
of these instructions is known as a programming
language.
There are over 200
programming languages currently in use. Some were designed for scientific use,
some for commercial applications while some others were meant for more
general-purposes . A programming language should have features that would
facilitate programmers in making and designing the solution steps easily.
C is a
powerful general-purpose language. This volume presents the advanced version of
C know as C++. C++ supports a
totally new concept of object-oriented
programming (OOP) and therefore it
is classified as an object-oriented technology. We chose C++ because it has
become an industry-standard OOP language today.
In OOP languages such as C++, the emphasis is on the
entities of the physical world called objects. These objects may represent a
person, a car, a table of data, or any item that the program must handle. We
human beings normally look at real-life problems as a collection of distinct
objects and try to solve them taking into account the relationship among the
objects. In a similar way, in C++, programming problems are analyzed in terms
of objects and the nature of communications between them.
No comments:
Post a Comment