Introduction

Before writing a program to solve a problem, we must have a thorough understanding of the problem and a carefully planned approach to solving it. When writing a program, we must also understand the types of building blocks that are available and employ proven program construction techniques. In this chapter and in Chapter 5, Control Statements: Part 2, we discuss these issues in presenting of the theory and principles of structured programming. The concepts presented here are crucial to building effective classes and manipulating objects.

In this chapter, we introduce C++'s if, if...else and while statements, three of the building blocks that allow programmers to specify the logic required for member functions to perform their tasks. We devote a portion of this chapter (and Chapters 5 and 7) to further developing the GradeBook class introduced in Chapter 3. In particular, we add a member function to the GradeBook class that uses control statements to calculate the average of a set of student grades. Another example demonstrates additional ways to combine control statements to solve a similar problem. We introduce C++'s assignment operators and explore C++'s increment and decrement operators. These additional operators abbreviate and simplify many program statements.