Unreal C++ Course - Update #3 - Referring to "the words"

My first handwritten post on this blog!

I managed to study for a couple of hours after work today:

I wanted to add a little more context to what this meter means. Truthfully, the tasks are not proportional to the lecture length. The lecture material gets much longer for the later projects, and I can only assume that the exercises will swell in tandem.

I think this is a good sign, as at this stage I am being given the building blocks to execute more complex ideas with more of my own interpretation later on. But it does mean that we have a long way to go yet. The meter would imply that I am 36% through the course. If I had to guess, I would say that is more like 20%.

Regarding the subject matter, today was pretty exciting:

• Hexadecimal was displayed in a way that made it intuitive to understand why it exists.
• Similarly, the display of memory as a physical location was well demonstrated.
• Building on that, I was able to more easily understand why references can be incredibly useful and efficient, especially for large data types like containers.
• Keeping as much constant (unable to be changed) as possible helps to know when calculations are being done on existing data vs actually modifying data and I can only imagine that would be a lifesaver when investigating the cause of a bug (it might prevent some, too!).

However, I was most excited about range-based For loops. I think it might be equivalent to Foreach in C#, but honestly I am not sure I remembered to use those when I was using C#. I am also not convinced the syntax is as satisfying as the C++ version:

That colon is all you need to skip a lot of abstracting and cluttering code. It is such an elegant solution, that becomes more informative by stripping down. This is a must-use for collections to avoid getting bogged down in code when doing a very human thing such as sorting through words.

And just in case it does get confusing, this kind of shorthand allows for side-by-side comments with the correct tabulation, which I vastly prefer over prefacing an entire block or interweaving throughout, bloating the code.

I can see how traditional loops would still be necessary for more abstract data or more complex manipulation.

Overall, I was very happy to start to move past learning things I already knew in another language and begin learning things University had tried to teach me but without the necessary context for me to absorb it.