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Wednesday, 21 February 2024

Chapter 2 // Exercise 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 - The C++ Programming Language


I bought this book a long time ago. The current edition was printed in 2013 and features up to C++11. On his website, Bjarne said he's never felt a need to update it but with all the new features in C++17 and C++20, I feel a 5th edition should be on the horizon and I'm wondering if it'll get released when I'm halfway through this one.

But either way. Welcome to this post featuring the exercises starting at chapter 2. I've done it this way as the first chapter was just writing exercises. 

Unlike Principles & Practice, the exercises can be found online and are not actually in the book:

Chapter 2 - A Tour of C++: The Basics
Exercise 1
When first reading this chapter, keep a record of information that was new or surprising to you. Later, use that list to focus your further studies

Will do.

Exercise 2
What does a compiler do? What does a linker do?

A compiler processes the source text from a project and turns it into object files. The linker turns the object files into an executable.

Exercise 3
Get the ‘‘Hello, world!’’ program (§2.2.1) to run. This is not an exercise in programming. It is an exercise to test your use of your edit-compile-link-execute tool chain.


Hello, world my old friend. I'm using Visual Studio Community 2022 with C++20 enabled. I'm also using my modified version of "std_lib_facilities" that's given in Principles & Practice. It can be found here:

Exercise 4
List three (or more) C++ compilers

GNU GCC, Clang, Intel C++ Compiler

Exercise 5
Write out a bool, a char, an int, a double, and a string.


Exercise 6
Read in a bool, a char, an int, a double, and a string.


Exercise 7
What is an invariant and what good might it do?

From what I can understand from Section 2.4.3.2 an invariant is a way of checking or asserting that some logic on class member variables is correct. So if you have an int member variable and that can only be initialised with positive numbers, the constructor would throw an error if you passed a negative number to it. There are other ways to enforce these "conditions" such as subscript operators checking that the value passed to it is within range of the size of the container.

Friday, 9 February 2024

Dad's Demo Disc Collection // Episode 1 - Planet PC Issue 6


So my dad passed away over a year ago now unexpectedly from a heart attack. I was very close to him and the past year has been tough, especially since my dad was a hoarder. It's taken me just over a year to finally clear out his house and get it sold. I lived with him for a long time before finally moving out in 2019 and after that the hoarding got exponentially worse without me throwing things out.

Amongst the hoard there was a lot of crap but there was also a lot of very interesting things. Dad was very big on PCs throughout the 80s and 90s and would make a lot of his own programs in DBase or Clipper. He was very much sold on DOS and by the time Windows 3.1 came around he was too set in his ways and hated it but kept buying PC Magazines until the early 2000s when he eventually lost interest in computing all together. 

Back then, PC Magazines always came with a disk each month with software demos on it, or fonts, clip art, games etc. I remember some of these disks as he would keep them in his shed and I would pick up a handful and go through them one by one on the family computer that was kept in the dining room.

I've found more boxes of disks than I can remember him having, and there's a lot of interesting things on these disks and I thought it would be a nice project to archive every single disk and upload the contents to internet archive and document that journey.

So welcome, to the first episode of Dad's Demo Disc Collection. I started off with a random box and took out the first disk which just so happened to be:
  • Planet PC Issue 6 - 19th April 2000
I eventually got the software working by using PCem: 

A full blown pc emulator. I ended up emulating a Pentium II computer running Voodoo 3 and Windows98. And I did that by following this great tutorial by PhilsComputerLab: 

You can find a zip of the disc here on Internet Archive: 

I especially enjoyed my first encounter with Sierra Home. I look forward to finding other Sierra Software.

Enjoy.