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 PROGRAMMING


  Understanding lvalues and rvalues in C and C++

The terms lvalue and rvalue are not something one runs into often in C/C++ programming, but when one does, it’s usually not immediately clear what they mean. The most common place to run into these terms are in compiler error & warning messages. For example, compiling the following with gcc:int foo() {return 2;}int main(){ foo() = 2; return 0;}You get:test.c: In function 'main':test.c:8:5: error: lvalue required as left operand of assignmentTrue, this code is somewhat perverse and not something you’d write, but the error message mentions lvalue, which is not a term one ...

3,377 0       C++ ELABORATION LVALUE RVALUE LOCATOR VALUE


  I don’t like the Ruby 1.9 hash syntax

There, I said it, I don’t like it. And I don’t know why you do either.I assume you like it anyway, everyone else I talk to seems to. My heart sank over and over again whilst I was at the recent RailsConf and saw respected rubyist after respected rubyist using the new Ruby 1.9 hash syntax in their presentations.I just don’t get it.But I’m not one to just moan. I plan to justify my feelings. Then maybe you can tell me why you do like it?My friend the hash rocketI like the hash rocket (not least because it’s a rocket) and I know it’s not going away. Howev...

7,739 0       RUBY FEATURE 1.9 HASH


  C++ Versus Objective-C

What will programming in Objective-C mean to the C++ programmerDifferent Object Oriented LanguagesAlmost all of us have heard the term object oriented programming, and most of us have used C++. How will Apple's purchase of NeXT, and NeXT's framework using Objective-C affect us as we develop software? If we know C++ already, how hard will it be to get up to speed on Objective-C? Many people will agree that once they understand the concepts of object oriented programming it doesn't matter which language they use. To a degree this is true, but development is easier if the programmer adopts a prog...

2,806 0       COMPARISON OOP C++ METHODS OBJECTIVE-C PHILOSOHPY


  Learning Ruby and Ruby vs Lisp

The company I work for has a lot of legacy Ruby code, and as Ruby has become kind of a mainstream language, I decided to get a book about it and learn how it works. As my learning resource, I chose The Ruby Programming language by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto as that receives great customer reviews, covers Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9 and is authoritative because the language creator is one of the authors. The book makes a good read in general. There are plenty of code examples, but not too much to obscure the prose. What I found first interesting, later annoyi...

6,467 1       OOP RUBY DIFFERENCE FEATURE FUNCTIONAL LISP


  A Month With Scala

Although I’ve played around with Scala for the few months, these efforts largely involved simple scripts and casual reading. It wasn’t until last month that the opportunity to use Scala in a large scale project finally arose and I dove right in. The project was a typical REST based web service built on top of Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk, SimpleDB, S3 and Redis*. First off let’s talk about why I chose Scala in the first place. After spending a good deal of my last year entrenched in JavaScript and appreciating its functional nature, brevity and flexibility, writing Ja...

2,469 0       JAVA OOP SCALA FUNCTIONAL ITERATION


  Notes on Programming in C

Introduction      Kernighan and Plauger'sThe Elements of Programming Stylewas an important and rightly influential book.  Butsometimes I feel its concise rules were taken as a cookbookapproach to good style instead of the succinct expression ofa philosophy they were meant to be.  If the book claims thatvariable names should be chosen meaningfully, doesn't itthen follow that variables whose names are small essays ontheir use are even better?  Isn't MaximumValueUntilOverflow a better name than maxval?  I don't think so.      What follows is a set...

1,976 0       TIPS C NOTES


  Java Doesn't Need to Be So Bad

I do a lot of Java coding and I enjoy it. I admit that there is a lotof typing, often a lot of boilerplate and getting even simple tasksdone can involve too much work. Most of the tools that try to fixthese problems trade one moment saved for another lost. Maven's XMLbased configuration file is a good example: Thank you for making myproject easier to manage and I won't forget that you made me edit XMLto do so.These are the things that you live with, these are the things youtrade for using a language that thinks it's finishing what C++started; a language that is loved equally by mammoth corpora...

2,462 0       JAVA CODING ENTERPRISE APPLICATION TEDIOUS


  Thoughts on Python 3

I spent the last couple of days thinking about Python 3's current state alot. While it might not appear to be the case, I do love Python as alanguage and especially the direction it's heading in. Python has been notonly part of my life for the last couple of five years, it has been thelargest part by far.Let there be a warning upfront: this is a very personal post. I counted ahundred instances of a certain capital letter in this text.That's because I am very grateful for all the opportunities I got over thelast few years to travel the world, to talk to people and to share thespirit that an ...

1,901 0       PYTHON FEATURE DRAWBACK PYTHON 3 EMBRACE