Homework #5: Pointers, Dynamic Arrays and Inheritance By J. H. Wang May 31, 2011

Part I: Hand-Written Exercises 1.Give at least three uses of the * operator. Name and describe each use. 2.You know that an overloaded assignment operator and a copy constructor are not inherited. Does this mean that if you do not define an overloaded assignment operator or a copy constructor for a derived class, then that derived class will have no assignment operator and no copy constructor? Please explain your reasons.

Part II: Programming Exercises 3. Using dynamic arrays, implement a polynomial class with polynomial addition, subtraction, and multiplication. Discussion : A variable in a polynomial does nothing but act as a placeholder for the coefficients. Hence, the only interesting thing about polynomials is the array of coefficients and the corresponding exponent. Think about the polynomial x*x*x + x+ 1. Where is the term in x*x? One simple way to implement the polynomial class is to use an array of doubles to store the coefficients. The index of the array is the exponent of the corresponding term. If a term is missing, then it simply has a zero coefficient. (There are techniques for representing polynomials of high degree with many missing terms. These use so-called sparse matrix techniques. Unless you already know these techniques, or learn very quickly, don’t use these techniques.) (To be continued on the next slide…)

(…Continued from the previous slide) (1) Provide a default constructor, a copy constructor, and a parameterized constructor that enables an arbitrary polynomial to be constructed. (2) Supply an overloaded operator = and a destructor. (3) Provide these operations: polynomial+polynomial, constant+polynomial, polynomial+constant, polynomial-polynomial, constant-polynomial, polynomial-constant, polynomial*polynomial, constant*polynomial, polynomial*constant, (4) Supply functions to assign and extract coefficients, indexed by exponent. (5) Supply a function to evaluate the polynomial at a value of type double. You should decide whether to implement these functions as members, friends, or standalone functions.

4. Define a class named Payment that contains a member variable of type float which stores the amount of the payment and appropriate accessor and mutator functions. Also create a member function named paymentDetails that outputs a sentence describing the amount of the payment. Next define a class named CashPayment that is derived from Payment. This class should redefine the paymentDetails function to indicate that the payment is in cash. Include appropriate constructor(s). (To be continued on the next slides…)

(… continued from the previous slide) Define a class named CreditCardPayment that is derived from Payment. This class should contain member variables for the name on the card, expiration date, and credit card number. Include appropriate constructor(s). Finally, redefine the paymentDetails function to include all credit card information in the printout. Create a main function that creates at least two CashPayment and two CreditCardPayment objects with different values and calls to paymentDetails for each.

Homework Submission Due: 2 weeks (June 14, 2011) Hand-written exercises –Please write your names and answers on papers. Programs –Please submit to homework submission Web site: