To learn about pointers, dynamic memory allocation and data structures managed by pointers.

Assignment-

name (string)

best_friend (Person *), a pointer to a persons best friend

popularity (int), a popularity counter that indicates how many other people have this person as their best friend.

Then write a program that gets names as input from the user (Read from the console using cin. You may tell the user to enter a name or q to quit entering names.) , allocates a new Person for each of them and stores the pointer to each of them in a vector. Then ask the user for the name of the best friend for each of the Person objects. Locate the object matching the friend's name and call a set_best_fiend method to update the best_friend pointer and the popularity counter. Finally, print out all Person objects , listing the name, best friend and popularity counter for each.

Other instructions

The main difficulty in this program is that you are dealing with pointers to Person objects. You are not directly dealing with Person objects. Keep this in mind as you write your code. Before you access any pointer, make sure it is not NULL. Write if statements as necessary to test for this. A persons popularity goes up if they are someones best friend. If you have a best friend that does not increase YOUR popularity. You need to write all necessary member functions for the class.

Note: This is not an assignment about separate compilation. You may write everything into the file hw9.cpp including your class declaration and definition.