(GlobalCpp) Bringing C++ Input into the 21st Century

Description

Input in C++ is needlessly complicated, especially for new programmers. This talk introduces readlib, which does for input what \ does for output - it brings it into the 21st Century, allowing reading to take place into consts or into auto variables, to handle errors using \ or to just silently retry and to allow in one line of code what previously took between 3 and 7 lines of code. It works with all the standard library input streams, such as reading from standard input, or files, or a stringstream, but it also works with tcpstreams as well if you want to do some simple networking. Readlib was originally written for education, but is more generally useful and makes handling input in C++ much more enjoyable. This talk will also present colorslib, which is a basic version of NCURSES for doing TUI coding, allowing 32-bit color, raw mode (instantaneous) input, and writing to arbitrary rows and columns on the screen.

About the Presenter

Bill Kerney is the chair of the ACM2Y, the subgroup of the ACM for community college computing education. He teaches computer science and game development full time at Clovis Community College and also lectures at Fresno State. He has been programming professionally in C++ for over 30 years, including doing game development, education research, and virtual reality history education. He has given over a hundred workshops around the country, and his current passion project is trying to fix the problems with transferring between community colleges and four-year institutions around the world.