How can I move away from (in c++) the annoying menus like:
(a) Do something (b) Do something else (c) Do that 3rd thing (x) exit
Basically I want to be able to run the program then do something like "calc 32 / 5" or "open data.csv", where obviously I would have written the code for "calc" and "open". Just a shove in the right direction would be great, I am sure I can figure it all out, I just need something to google-fu.
What you want is a command line parser. I can't remember the name, but there is actually a design pattern to this. However, this site gives you some sample code you can use to write one. Hope that's not giving you too much of the answer :)
I think you want to do something like this:
string cmd;
cout << "Enter your command:" << endl;
cin >> cmd;
if(cmd == "open") {
// read file name and open file
} else if (cmd == "calc") {
// read and evaluate expression
} ...
Though depending on how complex you want your command language to be, a more elaborate design (maybe even using a parser generator) might be appropriate.
Instead of looking for input like a, b, etc, just ask for generic input. Split the input at spaces, do a "switch" on the first one to match it up to your function calls, treat the rest as arguments.
You should pick up The C++ Programming Language, which is the book on C++ (there are others, but this one is great). It has an example program, spread over a few chapters, on tokenizing, parsing arguments, and making a calculator.
Is your menu based on a call to getchar()? If you want to allow entering an entire line before processing it, you can use fgets() or, in C++ land, std::getline.
Some folks will package their C++ class definitions as Python classes by adding a Python interface to the C++.
Then they write the top-level interpreter in Python using the built-in cmd library.
Take a look to: