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The NIH Class Library is a portable collection of classes similar to those of Smalltalk-80 that has been developed using the C++ programming language under the UNIX operating system. The NIH Class Library includes generally useful data types such as
String,
Date, and
Time, and most of the Smalltalk-80 container classes such as
OrderedCltn
(indexed arrays),
LinkedList
(singly-linked lists),
Set
(hash tables), and
Dictionary
(associative arrays). Arbitrarily complex data structures comprised of NIH Library and user-defined objects can be stored on disk files or moved between UNIX processes by means of an object I/O facility. Classes
Process,
Scheduler,
Semaphore, and
SharedQueue
provide multiprogramming with coroutines.
This reference manual provides a synopsis of each NIH Library class and a detailed description of each class's public and protected member functions. For more general information on the design of the NIH Class Library and how to use and extend it, see the book Data Abstraction and Object-Oriented Programming in C++ by Keith Gorlen, Sandy Orlow, and Perry Plexico (ISBN 0471 92346 X), 1990, John Wiley and Sons.
I would like to express my gratitude to my colleagues Sandy Orlow, Ted Persky, and Perry Plexico for reviewing early drafts of the manual and providing much valuable feedback. Special additional thanks go to Ted for carefully checking and formatting the final document.
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