As you’re already familiar with, when you call some functions, you need to pass arguments to them.  So, what about main?  There are two different function headers for he main method in C++ that we can use:

int main (); //header 1

and

int main(int argc, char* argv[]); //header 2

Now, you should ask yourself, “What’s the difference?”  Remember that when you execute a program (either from the command line or by double-clicking on an icon or something similar), you’re really asking the OS to load the executable and begin execution.  When the OS is starting your program, you can use command line arguments to send arguments into the main method.  Consider this program execution:

./myFunGame input.txt output.txt

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The first few weeks of the semester, we’ll take a deep(er) dive into pointers and dynamic memory management using C++.  To get started, I wanted to provide you some links to useful information.

• Stackoverflow.com – A treasure trove of software development and programming Q&A.  Very often, if you google an error message, you’ll see links to Stackoverflow.
• CPP Reference – a fantastic reference site
• learncpp.com – some good tutorials; great for a review of topics you may be rusty on.
• cplusplus.com – great reference material
• Cliff Shaffer’s Data Structures Book – This is what we’ll be using (for the most part) in class.

Regarding our first topic, pointers and memory management, here are some links to some other blog posts I did over the summer that might be helpful:

• Pointers  (check out the video links at the bottom)
• Memory Management (again – check out the video links)