Comparative Programming Languages

Lecturer: Mr C.K. Hadley (ckh@cl.cam.ac.uk)

No. of lectures: 4  

Introduction.

A brief history of C and C++. Standards. Comparing languages: levels of abstraction, programming paradigms. Obfuscation.

A rough guide to C and C++.

Pointers and Arrays.

What are pointers? Pointer arithmetic. What are arrays (really)? Null pointers. Array referencing errors, use of gets considered harmful. Errors involving abstract data structures. Function pointers. Call by value.

Memory allocation.

Scope. Heap and stack. Destructors. Memory deallocation errors. Memory leaks. Garbage collection.

Miscellaneous topics.

Machine dependencies. Separate compilation and data hiding. Setpoints. Operator overloading. Multiple inheritance.

Programming safety.

Debugging. Lint. Compiler security extensions.

Recommended books:

Kernighan, B.W. & Ritchie, D.M. (1988). The C Programming Language. Prentice Hall (2nd ed.).

Lippman, S. (1991). C++ Primer. Addison-Wesley.