Have you nailed C++ once you understand Pointers?

[ypfz3TCk]

Someone said that once you get pointers and arrays and understand the topic well, then you have licked learning C++

I know that pointers is a complex topic that applies to a lot of C++ - but would you agree that this is true??

[Disch]

It's a milestone for sure, but there's a lot more to the language than just pointers. So I'd say no.

[chrisname]

Pointers, then templates and then OOP (that's in chronological order) were the hardest parts for me. It took me ages to fully understand OOP; in fact I finally got my head around it when I read Oracle's Java tutorial and it explained about objects being like real objects in that they have a state and a behaviour. As an example, a monitor has a few states - on, off, on and drawing, on and idle:

enum monitor_state {
	MONITOR_OFF = 1 << 0,
	MONITOR_ON = 1 << 1,
	MONITOR_DRAWING = 1 << 2,
	MONITOR_IDLE = 1 << 3
};

class monitor {
	private:
		unsigned state;
	// ...
};

It also has behaviours - turn off, turn on and refresh, for example:

// ...
	public:
		void turn_on()
		{
			this->state |= MONITOR_ON;
		}

		void turn_off()
		{
			this->state |= MONITOR_OFF;
		}

		void refresh()
		{
			if ((this->state & MONITOR_OFF) == MONITOR_OFF) // Only refresh if turned on
				return;
			this->state |= MONITOR_DRAWING;
			this->draw();
			this->state |= MONITOR_IDLE;
		}
// ... 

Thinking about objects like this and writing a few classes to represent real-world objects has finally made me understand OOP.

[moorecm]

The answer is no.