Defining Class and Declaring Objects
A class is defined in C++ using the keyword class followed by the name of the class. The body of the class is defined inside the curly brackets and terminated by a semicolon at the end.
C++ Classes and Objects
Class in C++ is the building block that leads to Object-Oriented programming. It is a user-defined data type, which holds its own data members and member functions, which can be accessed and used by creating an instance of that class. A C++ class is like a blueprint for an object. For Example: Consider the Class of Cars. There may be many cars with different names and brands but all of them will share some common properties like all of them will have 4 wheels, Speed Limit, Mileage range, etc. So here, Car is the class, and wheels, speed limits, and mileage are their properties.
- A Class is a user-defined data type that has data members and member functions.
- Data members are the data variables and member functions are the functions used to manipulate these variables together, these data members and member functions define the properties and behavior of the objects in a Class.
- In the above example of class Car, the data member will be speed limit, mileage, etc, and member functions can be applying brakes, increasing speed, etc.
An Object is an instance of a Class. When a class is defined, no memory is allocated but when it is instantiated (i.e. an object is created) memory is allocated.