In this chapter, you learned more about functions, including function prototypes, function signatures, function headers and function bodies. We overviewed the math library functions. You learned about argument coercion, or the forcing of arguments to the appropriate types specified by the parameter declarations of a function. We demonstrated how to use functions rand and srand to generate sets of random numbers that can be used for simulations, then presented C++11’s nondeterministic capabilities for producing more secure random numbers. We introduced C++14’s digit separators for more readable numeric literals. We showed how to define sets of constants with scoped enums. You learned about the scope of variables. Two different ways to pass arguments to functions were covered—pass-by-value and pass-by-reference. For pass-by-reference, a reference is used as an alias to a variable. We showed how to implement inline functions and functions that receive default arguments. You learned that multiple functions in one class can be overloaded by providing functions with the same name and different signatures. Such functions can be used to perform the same or similar tasks, using different types or different numbers of parameters. We demonstrated a simpler way of overloading functions using function templates, where a function is defined once but can be used for several different types. You then studied recursion, where a function calls itself to solve a problem.

In Chapter 7, you’ll learn how to maintain lists and tables of data in arrays and object-oriented vectors. You’ll see a more elegant array-based implementation of the dice-rolling application.