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CST 338 - Week 3

In this week's material, we expanded on what we started previously about arrays, classes, and inheritance, and put it together to create a program that simulates a deck of 52 standard playing cards and then performs basic card operations such as shuffling a deck and dealing it to "players", which are classified as Hand objects (objects that store Card objects in internal arrays).

I haven't gotten this program any kind of approval or convinced some sort of online gambling site to use it for some of the backend they use to run their casino games, but I'll keep all of you readers of this lovely blog once I do, and how much money I make (or lose) off it.

Disclaimer: I am not promoting or endorsing gambling with your assets.

Speaking of arrays, the largest multi-dimensional array I've ever used was a 10 x 10 array that an old professor of mine came up with for a simulated "Battleship" program in another class I took early in my computer science career. He came up with the classes to generate the playing field, and we had to simulate multiple games amongst two players with wins/losses/ships sunk. It was an entertaining assignment to run once my partner and I got everything working together.

I don't particularly think any single array size would be unwieldy to work with, but the worst ones would be arrays that cause memory leaks have some algorithms with awful runtimes, such as O(n^3), or the absolute worst: cause out of bounds errors. Thankfully, I've never seen such code both in school and browsing around open source projects that would be so buggy, and I don't want to think about it. However, I have a feeling I will need to face my fears eventually and fix such code in the future, so I must prepare myself mentally now.

Inheritance is a beautiful thing about object-oriented programming, and its biggest strength is simplifying program structure and allowing the reuse of good code. One of the earliest examples of when I used inheritance in code was in a homework assignment to create four classes, one superclass and three subclasses. My superclass was "Aircraft", and the subclasses were "Fighter", "Bomber", and "Cargo", and the superclass defined attributes such as weight, number of engines, and number of crew. I thought it was a simple and elegant solution to demonstrate inheritance. 




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