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:

https://www.stroustrup.com/4thExercises.pdf

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.

Github: https://github.com/l-paz91/TheCppProgrammingLanguage/blob/main/Chapter%202/Exercise%203

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:

https://github.com/l-paz91/TheCppProgrammingLanguage/blob/main/std_lib_facilities.h

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.

Github: https://github.com/l-paz91/TheCppProgrammingLanguage/blob/main/Chapter%202/Exercise%205

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Exercise 6

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

Github: https://github.com/l-paz91/TheCppProgrammingLanguage/blob/main/Chapter%202/Exercise%206

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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.