Purpose:A practical introduction to the concepts of templates and inheritence.

Reading:Chapters 8, 9 and 14.

Motivation:The ability to create generic data structures through the use of templates puts a very powerful and useful tool in the hands of the programmer. By combining this with the ability to inherit data and methods from one class to another we can learn how to not only make generic data structures but see how we can save ourselves coding time and effort.

Assignment:

• Modify the pointer based Linked List you created for Lab 5 to include the following methods:
  • void addToFront(item)
  • item takeFromFront()
  • void addToRear(item)
  • item takeFromRear()

  Note: you will need to add an additional pointer to the private data to keep track of the last item in the list.

• Create a test program and insure that the new methods you have added to the List work before proceeding.
• Create a Queue class by inheriting the List class and reuse the constructors, destructor and overloaded assignment operators; create the Queue enqueue and dequeue operations by invoking the addAtRear and takeFromFront operations of the base class (List). Since Queues don't have an operation to add anything to the middle of the Queue make the List:insert operation unavailable for Queues by stubbing it off (iverload the name and give it a {} body}.
• Create a test program and insure that your new Queue class works before proceeding.
• Make the List and Queue generic by turning them into templates.
• Modify lab7tester.cpp as needed to demonstrate that your template classes work.
• Submit all source files and your makefile (for lab7tester) to the lab7 folder on your FTP account.