C++ Newbie - Derived Class Issue

[Sk#]

Just an observation, but I'm always surprise to see code from students learning programming (specially C++) to use char/char[] rather then std::string. Why do professors still teach that in Universities?

Last question was more rhetorical one.

I can tell you why. Usually, the academic programming courses are about C, and OOP courses teach Java. When one starts using C++, nobody teaches him about the STL and the containers, so he goes on using null-terminated char arrays and pointers to arrays.

[NMTop40]

1. private is spelt P-R-I-V-A-T-E.

2. In C++ strings are stored using std::string not arrays of char. They are also often passed around as const std::string & although they may be passed by value.

3. Methods that do not change the state of the class are declared const.


so

#include <string>

class Employee
{

private:
  std::string name;
  std::string ssn;
  std::string empId;
  std::string hireDate;

public:
  Employee();
  Employee
   (
        const std::string & social, const std::string & EmpId, 
        const std::string & HireDate, const std::string & Name
  ); 

  bool setSocial( const std::string & ]);
  void printSocial() const;
  bool setEmpId(const std::string &);
  void printEmpId() const;
  bool setHireDate( const std::string &);
  void printHireDate() const;
  bool setName( const std::string & );
  void printName() const;
};

Even now all you have is a few strings grouped together. Also printName() etc is not a good idea, preferable is getName() and then the caller can print the string if they wish.