essentially the same boat … so have fun and a nice week end
cheers 
Q: Pointers (C++)
dotTom
#23
Please, you want to be learning and using STL. Learn auto_ptr<T> and vector<T> etc. I mean it pays to know enough pointer stuff to debug yourself out of a corner but I would urge against writing any large body of code without STL. Naked pointers and built in arrays only get you so far (in the real world). Really, data structures are a largely solved and boring problem. Get into iterators and <algorithms> and you’ll never look back - more importantly you’ll be turning out loads more useful and robust code than your friends who’ll be sweating their own balanced tree (or worse) implementation. You want to focus on the problem domain, which presumably will be graphics related, not the sordid business of text book data structures.
Too many programmer IMO think of C++ as a kind of glorified machine independent assembly language, especially in the graphics field. One of the best bits of advice I can give would be, before you invest hours and hours of your time optimizing what you think is a hot spot in your code measure it. Measurement should always preceed optimizaton. Write your code first of all to be clear and maintainable. Then measure it, then optimize.
Katachi
#24
Hi,
I agree that code comments are not always necessary. I even think it is dumb and anti-programming if one comments every tiny bit. That is and won´t be programming in C++.
And just like one said, if your code really is good (means following your naming conventions + good and clean OO programming and similar) you will almost need no comments at all.
Saying this is a dumb myth is not very wise. I am programming for over 4 years in C++ and my brother is doing so for…darn, I don´t know how long, he started when he was 6 (not with C++ of course) and is now 28. He is programming for Volkswagen here in my hometown Wolfsburg (C++ and Java), and this is always what he told me. “When you fully understand the OO approach and you are writing it the way it is supposed to be, then you don´t need more than 2 comments.” Of course this shouldn´t be taken literally but the message is the same!
And you know what, when I write my classes I see myself using too many comments. When I rework my classes, I most of the time don´t need any comments. Similar for “runtime code” (that´s how I call it 
). I comment about every 20th line. This is more than I need. When working with others I need some more comments even if we use naming conventions.
Sure, programming without any comments…well, it´s a brave thought, but you won´t get too far with that.
Darn, we are discussing comments here! He should rather concentrate on other things. Depending on what he wants to do with C++, understanding the OOP with C++ is far more important to write fast and efficient C++ code.
Learning assembly for C++ efficiency is, imo, a fallacy.
Katachi
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