I really wish more projects would use .hpp to differentiate from C headers. It’s really annoying to have a single header extension blend across two incompatible languages.
I did this in a project and someone later came and changed them all to .h, because that was “the convention” and because “any C is valid C++”. Obviously neither of those things is true and I am constantly befuddled by people’s use of the word convention to mean “something some people do”. It didn’t seem worth the argument though.
…so that leads to another annoyance of mine. The insistence that there aren’t two languages but indeed one named C/C++. Obviously I’m being a bit sarcastic but people blur the lines HEAVILY and it drives me crazy. Most of the C code I’ve written is not compatible with C++…at least not without a lot of type casting at a bare minimum. Or a compiler flag to disable that. Never mind the other differences. And then there’s the restrict keyword, and the ABI problems if the C library you’re using doesn’t extern C in the headers…etc etc… -_-
C++ is a superset of C.
It’s actually not. Objective-C is a superset of C. C++ is not. It’s MOSTLY compatible…but it’s not a superset. See the restrict keyword, or the need for casting to and from void*, or the inability to name variables new or delete, or class, or this. I can’t count how many C projects I have which use this as a variable name that WILL NOT compile as C++…or the need for extern C to call C ABI code…in no way is it a superset
EDIT: lol, you can downvote me if you want but I think you need to lookup what a superset is
hpp is a superset of h
I don’t code in C++ (although I’m somewhat familiar with the syntax). My understanding is the header files should only contain prototypes / signatures, not actual implementations. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Have I misunderstood, or is that part of the joke?
Well, it’s even just horrid code, because they’re reading user input in some random associated function, so I think, it’s safe to say that this is supposed to be horrid code.
I’m not fully sure what the intent of the joke is, but note that yes, it’s true that a header typically just has the prototype. However, tons of more advanced libraries are “header-only”. Everything is in a single header originally, in development, or it’s a collection of headers (that optionally gets “amalgamated” as a single header). This is sometimes done intentionally to simplify integration of the library (“just copy this files to your repo, or add it as a submodule”), but sometimes it’s entirely necessary because the code is just template code that needs to be in a header.
C++ 20 adds modules, and the situation is a bit more involved, but I’m not confident enough of elaborating on this. :) Compile times are much better, but it’s something that the build system and the compilers needs to support.
Not a C++ developer, I prefer C. You are right in general however my understanding is that classes which are generic using templates must be fully implemented in header files because of how templates are implemented. That being said this code doesn’t appear to use templates so I’m not entirely sure I get it either?
Templates can now be defined somewhere else. It’s a small improvement that no one uses.
Do other languages separate definition from implementation? 🤔 Is there another way to distribute libraries with a binary component and a public component?
