A special type-independent programming approach using available underlying constructs in a programming language

  • Authors:
  • Iraj Danesh

  • Affiliations:
  • Alabama State University, Montgomery, Alabama

  • Venue:
  • ACM Inroads
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Facilities such as templates, STL, and Boost libraries are popular sources for generic programming and present a high-level view of the machine to the students of programming. The approach presented in this paper emphasizes on a different method of type independent programming that presents a lower-level view of the machine to the students. The merit of this approach is that students will gain some insight into the implementation of generics and better understand the underlying constructs available to them. Programming in this task becomes innovative and more challenging and enriches in-debt knowledge of the students in underlying layers in certain courses of computer science, and potentially contributes to computing education. Prospective C++ built-in constructs (other than templates) were studied to obtain their feasibility of how each or a combination of them can be employed to write data-type independent programs. Several code segments were developed and tested to confirm the genericness and applicability of each of them individually or as a combination.