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I am writing a program to calculate prices of commodity options as part
of my Masters degree in Finance. (Absolutely no prior knowledge of
computer programming was assumed.)

I am representing dates as integers. It's important to be able to
derive the month from the date so I have programmed this using mod 365
arithmetic.

I have several classes that use dates as private objects.

How do I set up my get_month function (which gives the month of any
date) so that different classes can all make use of it without me
needing to copy and paste the code separately in each class?

Yes, I know it's a standard problem...

Actually, it now occurs to me that I will probably simply have a date
class and have other classes contain a variable of the type date.

However, there still must be a way of building functions which work on
a variety of classes.

I suppose I'm really asking for a good classes_for_beginners tutorial
or website.

Thank you,

Paul Epstein

wrote:
> I am writing a program to calculate prices of commodity options as part
> of my Masters degree in Finance. (Absolutely no prior knowledge of
> computer programming was assumed.)
>
> I am representing dates as integers. It's important to be able to
> derive the month from the date so I have programmed this using mod 365
> arithmetic.
>
And leap years?

How about looking up the date/time API for your platform? Doing so
could save you a lot of unnecessary work.

Ian

Ian wrote:
> wrote:

> > I am writing a program to calculate prices of commodity options as part
> > of my Masters degree in Finance. (Absolutely no prior knowledge of
> > computer programming was assumed.)
> >
> > I am representing dates as integers. It's important to be able to
> > derive the month from the date so I have programmed this using mod 365
> > arithmetic.
>
> And leap years?
>
> How about looking up the date/time API for your platform? Doing so
> could save you a lot of unnecessary work.

hence locking your program to a particular platform. There is the
venerable
time.h (or as its spelled in C++ ctime). It's a little clunky but it
could be
wrapped up in a class to make it a little friendlier. There is also a
boost
library that handles time see www.boost.org


--
Nick Keighley

On 2005-12-04, <> wrote:
> I am writing a program to calculate prices of commodity options
> as part of my Masters degree in Finance. (Absolutely no prior
> knowledge of computer programming was assumed.)
>
> I have several classes that use dates as private objects.
>
> How do I set up my get_month function (which gives the month of
> any date) so that different classes can all make use of it
> without me needing to copy and paste the code separately in
> each class?

Create a date class with the interface your classes need, and
have your classes that need them contain dates.

--
Neil Cerutti