Lab 1 - Template Classes and Exception Handling

The purpose of this lab is to add exception handling and an index operator to a template class.

Log into Sleipnir and create a new directory for this lab. Download the files genericlist.cpp and lab1main.cpp to that directory. You can download these files using the wget command or by copying the whole file from your browser window and using the command :set paste in vim.

Even though two files are provided, this code does NOT use seperate compilation. It uses the include directive to "cut and paste" genericlist.cpp into lab1main.cpp. You compile lab1main.cpp like any other program with the command (NOTE: the code will NOT compile until you add the index operator):

g++ -g -o lab1 lab1main.cpp

The genericlist.cpp file contains a template class that allocates a dynamic array based on the data passed to the constructor. Pay special attention to the syntax above the template class. This is required whenever you wish to have a friend function of a template class. In this case, the friend function is the output operator which prints all of the elements to the given output stream.

In the lab1main.cpp file, the pretty_print() function wraps around the output operator to create a nicer looking output. The double version sets the precision to two decimal places while the template version adds a tab before the output. These are global functions which take a template class object. There is another global function, run_tests(), which creates the template objects and tests their functionality. Finally in main(), input arrays of various datatypes are created and passed to run_tests() to test the template class.

Lab Assignment

• bad_alloc exception handling - Take the current array allocation calls and put each within a try block. Catch the bad_alloc exception if it occurs and set the array pointer to NULL and the size to 0.
• Index [] operator with InvalidIndex exception - Add the index operator to the class. The index operator will throw an InvalidIndex object if the index given is less than 0 or greater than size - 1. You will also need to define the InvalidIndex class.