Quick guide part 2a

is currently available at developer.apple.com/technologies/tools/.

Windows Installation

To install GCC at Windows you need to install MinGW. To install MinGW, go to the MinGW homepage, www.mingw.org, and follow the link to the MinGW download page. Download the latest version of the MinGW installation program which should be named MinGW-<version>.exe.

While installing MinGW, at a minimum, you must install gcc-core, gcc-g++, binutils, and the MinGW runtime, but you may wish to install more.

Add the bin subdirectory of your MinGW installation to your PATH environment variable so that you can specify these tools on the command line by their simple names.

When the installation is complete, you will be able to run gcc, g++, ar, ranlib, dlltool, and several other GNU tools from the Windows command line.

C++ Basic Syntax

When we consider a C++ program, it can be defined as a collection of objects that communicate via invoking each other's methods. Let us now briefly look into what a class, object, methods, and instant variables mean.

• Object − Objects have states and behaviors. Example: A dog has states - color, name, breed as well as behaviors - wagging, barking, eating. An object is an instance of a class.
• Class − A class can be defined as a template/blueprint that describes the behaviors/states that object of its type support.
• Methods − A method is basically a behavior. A class can contain many methods. It is in methods where the logics are written, data is manipulated and all the actions are executed.
• Instance Variables − Each object has its unique set of instance variables. An object's state is created by the values assigned to these instance variables.

C++ Program Structure

Let us look at a simple code that would print the words Hello World.

 Live Demo

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

// main() is where program execution begins.
int main() {
   cout << "Hello World"; // prints Hello World
   return 0;
}

Let us look at the various parts of the above program −

• The C++ language defines several headers, which contain information that is either necessary or useful to your program. For this program, the header <iostream> is needed.
• The line using namespace std; tells the compiler to use the std namespace. Namespaces are a relatively recent addition to C++.
• The next line '// main() is where program execution begins.' is a single-line comment available in C++. Single-line comments begin with // and stop at the end of the line.
• The line int main() is the main function where program execution begins.
• The next line cout << "Hello World";causes the message "Hello World" to be displayed on the screen.
• The next line return 0; terminates main( )function and causes it to return the value 0 to the calling process.