Poker_design_doc.md

Elements of the design

Generic Cards / Player Hand classes separated from any card game logic

Cards are the core element, usable for any card game (Card library)

concept of "player Hand", deck and as an ownership container for the set of cards which a player has (PlayerHand library)

stacks / double ended queues for ordered drawing and card disposal

Design decision: should the cards be a finite set of objects allocated to the heap at initialization?

Pro: stable, clear ownership and provably no duplication due to unique pointer movement Contra: non contiguous memory in the player hands will lead to slower sorting or comparison operations Neutral: such games will have very low performance and memory requirements relative to the hardware, therefore either option will be fine

Separation of the player Hand from the Card Game and score evaluation

Pro: Card Game logic is specific to each game and can be adapted to 5 card poker, texas hold-em or other types of poker

Card game as parent class, allowing game dependent variation?

how much common functionality is there? first do a poker game, then a second game and only then refactor into a parent class whatever is common.

scoring methods: game dependant, game independent?

-> use free functions in a common namespace for the evaluation of specific hands like "pair", "three of a kind", "flush" etc