Summary

With classes, C++ provides a powerful and flexible mechanism to encapsulate data and methods to provide behavior that acts on the data. You can template this code so that you can write generic code and get the compiler to generate code for the types that you require. In the example, you have seen how classes are the basis of object orientation. A class encapsulates data, so that the caller only needs to know about the expected behavior (in this example, getting the next result in a search), without needing to know the details of how the class does this. In the next chapter, we will investigate further features of classes; in particular, code reuse through inheritance.