Consequences of the First-Class ADT pattern
Explore the First-Class ADT pattern's consequences in C programming. Understand how it improves encapsulation, manages dependencies, controls object lifecycle, and affects performance and memory use. Gain insights into applying this pattern to decouple interface from implementation effectively.
We'll cover the following...
Copy semantics
As clients only use a handle, which we have declared as a pointer, to the ADT, the issue of copy semantics boils down to pointer assignment. While efficient, in terms of run-time performance, copies of a handle have to be managed properly. The handles are only valid as long as the real object exists.
In case we want to copy the real object and thus create a new, unique instance of the ADT, we have to define an explicit copy operation.
Dependencies managed
With the interface Customer.h , the C language guarantees us that the internals of the data structure are
encapsulated in the implementation with no possibility for clients to access the internals of the ...