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C++ standard APIs

Hi there,

I used to program in Java. But now I am working on a legacy C++ code base. I'm not very familiar with C++ and it takes me a long time to understand the code. Especially, there are a lot of functions I don't know where to find their synopses; in Java, I can go to Sun's website to look for the corresponding API. Can anybody tell me is there is some place that has complete collection of the C++ APIs descriptions? Many thanks.

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Karl Heinz Kremer

If you program in Visual Studio (and have the MSDN library intalled), you can place the cursor over a keyword or a function name and hit the F1 key. This will bring up the help for the selected term.

If you are using any other IDE, there may be a similar feature available.

If this still leaves you in the dark, try http://www.cplusplus.com/.

Unfortunately C++ is not platform independant like Java, so every implementation has different libraries.

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Tommy Braas

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Karl Heinz Kremer

orangehead911 is correct, I should have said "C++ environments are not platform independent". The reality however is that it's very unlikely that one C++ program that is more than just a toy application will compile on a different platform without any changes.
As soon as user interface libraries are involved, this is definitely the case.
If you are working in a Unix environment, you can use the "man" command to get information about most library functions and system calls:
"man sprintf" will display the man page for all printf type commands (printf, fprintf, sprintf, snprintf, vprintf, vfprintf, vsprintf, vsnprintf)