this, is a special keyword and pointer. It points to the very object is it in… you may think of it as self-referencing to it’s own object.
This is important in case a class method has a parameter name with the same name as a class property. If the keyword this is not used, then it will use the parameter.
Circle::Circle(double radius)
{
this->radius = radius;
}The This Object Reference was originally found on Access 2 Learn
Assistant Professor
Walter Wimberly is an Assistant Professor at a regional college in Tennessee, teaching Computer Science in the Software Engineering track. He works as a student advisor, oversees curriculum changes, develops new courses, and manages the advisory panel.
Walter taught full time for about 7 years, before going back into “industry” as a full stack Software Developer for a dozen years. There he focused on web based projects coding in JavaScript/jQuery and utilizing the Bootstrap CSS Framework on the front-end, and coding in PHP, ASP/ASP.Net, SQL on the back-end.
Since he loves teaching, he taught as an adjunct web and digital media classes for eight (8) years, while working in industry, and has since returned to teaching full time.
He has been married for over 25 years, and is father to several special needs boys. As such, he is working on some projects to help others who have special needs to be self-sufficient, and support the care givers of those with special needs. Check out his Autism blog for more info.
Object Oriented Programming (OOP) involves programming using objects. An Object is made from a Class which defines the attributes of the object and the behaviors. Think about it like what is it about or with adjectives (attributes) and what it can do, or verbs, (behaviors). As an example let’s consider a Class called Student. A…
We’ve looked at Constructors in C++ to create an object, and building an object with new. However, what happens when we no longer need that object? That’s where a destructor is called. It is built into all objects, and if you don’t define one, a default one will be called for you. The destructor’s job…
Once you create your class, you need to create an object. The Class is just a blueprint for the program to follow. It doesn’t do anything until you create an object based off of that blueprint. Think of a house. If you have a house blueprint, all you have are some sheets of paper or…
We’ve mentioned that you pass values to a function. This is mostly true. When you pass a hard coded value as your argument, you always pass the value. See the example below. If you pass a primitive data type (int, float, long, double, char, bool – just to name a few examples), you pass by…
The char data type is used to store a single character. The literal value is stored within a set single quotes. Old style C strings were actually an array of chars, but now we have our own string data type. Even when we store a number in a char, it is the char value, not…
Using arrays to store a collection of variables, even objects, if very beneficial. However, it does have some limitations given that arrays are of a fixed size, and cannot shrink or grow with use. This means you either run out of space after a set of time, or you waste a lot of space as…
