macOS beginner C++ discrepancy

[ifjake]

I'm currently taking a beginners C++ course that apparently uses outdated standards and such, and I'm trying to reconcile the ways of doing things as we are taught in class with the more up-to-date ways of doing things. Previously I figured out how the .h-ending header files were different than the non-.h ones and how for example with iostream you have to add a using namespace std; line for cout statements to look normal. I'm still figuring out what that means exactly, but I can get it to work so I'm not that concerned.

What I'm curious about now is the arguments within the main function header as put there by default when starting a C++ command line project: main(int argc, char * const argv[]). What the heck are these for? What "topic" would I look under to figure out more about this?

 

[coconn06]

What I'm curious about now is the arguments within the main function header as put there by default when starting a C++ command line project: main(int argc, char * const argv[]). What the heck are these for? What "topic" would I look under to figure out more about this?

The parameters in the main() function represent values passed to your program from the command line. It's been a long time since I did C++ so bear with me; I think "int argc" is the number of arguments, and the char array is an array of the command line values.

 

[rtharper]

The parameters in the main() function represent values passed to your program from the command line. It's been a long time since I did C++ so bear with me; I think "int argc" is the number of arguments, and the char array is an array of the command line values.

argc is the number of arguments. argv is a array of pointers to strings (i.e. an array of char arrays), each of which is one argument. Not saying you were wrong, just clarifying for the person that was asking =)

 

[cbougher]

Also bear in mind that the first entry in argv (offset=0) is the name of the program itself so if you call you program like this:

>cppprogram arg1 15 2.67

argc will be 4 and argv[] will be {"cppprogram", "arg1", "15", "2.67"}