Object-Orientated Programming with ANSI-C

This book is not going to praise object-oriented programming or condemn the Old Way. We are simply going to use ANSI-C to discover how object-oriented programming is done, what its techniques are, why they help us solve bigger problems, and how we harness generality and program to catch mistakes earlier. Along the way we encounter all the jargon — classes, inheritance, instances, linkage, methods, objects, polymorphisms, and more — but we take it out of the realm of magic and see how it translates into the things we have known and done all along. I had fun discovering that ANSI-C is a full-scale object-oriented language. To share this fun you need to be reasonably fluent in ANSI-C to begin with — feeling comfortable with structures, pointers, prototypes, and function pointers is a must. Working through the book you will encounter all the newspeak — according to Orwell and Webster a language ‘‘designed to diminish the range of thought’’ — and I will try to demonstrate how it merely combines all the good programming principles that you always wanted to employ into a coherent approach. As a result, you may well become a more proficient ANSI-C programmer.