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Home Classes and invariants A Function on Complex Numbers
 
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A Function on Complex Numbers

A natural operation we might want to perform on complex numbers is addition. If the numbers are in Cartesian coordinates, addition is easy: you just add the real parts together and the imaginary parts together. If the numbers are in polar coordinates, it is easiest to convert them to Cartesian coordinates and then add them.

Again, it is easy to deal with these cases if we use the accessor functions:

Complex add (Complex& a, Complex& b)
{
  double real = a.getReal() + b.getReal();
  double imag = a.getImag() + b.getImag();
  Complex sum (real, imag);
  return sum;
}

Notice that the arguments to add are not const because they might be modified when we invoke the accessors. To invoke this function, we would pass both operands as arguments:

  Complex c1 (2.0, 3.0);
  Complex c2 (3.0, 4.0);

  Complex sum = add (c1, c2);
  sum.printCartesian();

The output of this program is

5 + 7i

Home Classes and invariants A Function on Complex Numbers

Last Update: 2005-12-05