February 22, 2002
Reading assignment:
  Deitel and Deitel - 7.5 - 7.7
  -or-
  Wang

Today we'll work on programming assignment 4 together
  - This assignment will be worth more than the other programming assignments
  - First we'll build the declarations of the classes StudentRec and
    StudentGroup.  This won't be the final version, because we need to
    supply a destructor, an overloaded copy constructor and an overloaded
    assignment operator.  We'll discuss how to do this next week
  - After writing the class declarations, we'll write skeletons for the
    class implementations
  - Next we'll write a skeleton for the main program
  - Finally, we can implement the details of all of the functions
  - We'll discuss how linked lists are used to manage dynamically allocated
    memory

Section 7.5 from Deitel and Deitel - the "this" pointer
  - Inside of the implementation of a class, you can have access to
    data members merely by mentioning their name.  These data members are
    part of "this" object, and you can have access to the address of this
    object.  Inside of the implementation of the class, the variable named
    this points to this object
  - Inside of an implementation, the expression this->data_member is
    synonymous with data_member
  - One use of this is to use it to have certain member functions return
    a pointer to this object, allowing clients to "cascade" their member
    calls.  You can read about this use of this in section 7.5 of D&D.
    We'll return to this in Chapter 8 when we overload the << and >> operators

Section 7.7 from Deitel and Deitel - static member functions
  - It's possible to have member functions that belong to an entire class,
    rather than to each object.  In other words, every object of a class
    can share the same copy of a data member.  
  - You can even have static member functions.  These functions can be
    called even if you don't have an object of that class, but they cannot
    access any data members, unless those data members are also static.
  - Next time I'll show you an example of using a static data member in
    our StudentRec class