Wed, 07 Jan 2009
C++ for Python Programmers: a Cheatsheet
A fellow prof here at MSU, Rich Enbody, whipped up the following cheat-sheet for new programmers transitioning from Python (CSE 231) to C++ (CSE 232). He welcomes comments. Here's the link:
http://web.cse.msu.edu/~cse231/python2Cpp.html
Paranthetically, he and his cohort in crime, Bill Punch, will be giving a talk about using Python as the intro CS programming language at PyCon '09. They have some interesting stats on the effects of a mixed Python-C++ curriculum vs a C++-C++ course base for the first year of programming.
And folks... remember, this is for intro programmers who don't know C++ yet!
--titus
posted at: 12:56 | path: /jan-09 | 2 comments
Comments:
Posted by Evan at Wed Jan 7 15:59:24 2009:
Pretty nice. I already know C++ pretty well but I'm going to share this with some of my friends who are Python-specific.
Posted by Fabien at Wed Jan 7 16:27:22 2009:
A few problems in that first draft, mostly due to the author's C background:
1/ In contrast to C, in C++, declaring variables at the beginning of the block is a bad habit at best, and quite often impossible.
C code:
int a, b;
a =3;
++a;
b= 4;
C++ equivalent:
int a= 3;
++a;
int b= 4;
2/ "File Input and Output": I'm not 100% sure the code won't work, but this one is far better and more canonical:
int main()
{
string line;
ifstream InStream ("Data.txt");
while (getline (InStream,line))
{
cout << line << endl; // output the line
}
}
3/ Arrays.
C-style arrays are only used if you need to put some hard-coded values. And they're not even proper arrays -- they're nearly pointers (which pretty much means, lots of headaches).
In C++, the canonical type for an array is vector<>. It's a real array, whose size can change whenever you wish, and that you can copy.
vector<int> a (10);
vector<int> b= a;
vector<int> c;
c= b;