[Sian Ennis]

Just to knit-pick, programming languages and deployment/runtime strategies aren't the same thing (although they can end up becoming intertwined). C++ is a language...in theory one could compile code written in that language in a bunch of different ways (including interpreting it at runtime as a script) depending on how good a job programmer did at keeping dependency-specific code encapsulated. The "programming" usage of the language and the compile/deploy/execute usage need not be married.

In general most C++ compilers build native code, so you have to know which platform you're building for ahead of time. Scripting hosts and platforms that use a pre-installed runtime environment (like Java and .NET) are either deployed as-is or are compiled to some kind of pre-binary IL (intermediate language) and are either interpreted/run by a platform-specific scripting host or virtual machine or compiled to a native binary at runtime (JiT). Obviously scripts and common runtime environments have the advantage of portability (sometimes also self-description, reflection, morphing, etc.) while pre-compiling to native code will usually yield the best-performing executables. Those are just rules of thumb, though, and certainly have exceptions (no pun intended).

[Hilm Music]

There you go! /tongue.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':P' />

[Natalie J Webster]

I was thinking more along the lines of

public static boolean toggle(boolean a){        return a == false;}

To stay in line with what SheridanR had mentioned, but that also works (and it's what I'd use -- except that I wouldn't bother making a funtion for something that simple...)

[Ashley Tamen]

All the cool kids use XOR these days.

public static boolean toggle(boolean a){		return a ^= true;}

/tongue.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':tongue:' />

[cheryl wright]

Right, the use of a function there would actually be bad.

It adds extra overhead, however minor, that could be avoided by just doing the ! directly.

I prefer simplicity over verbosity, as you know, so yeah. It also looks cleaner to use ! instead of == false. /tongue.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':tongue:' />


I just find that sort of thing to be a bit hard to read for my tastes. /shrug.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':shrug:' />

[Jarrett Willis]

Of course...it's an example of sacrificing readability in the name of a useless amount of optimization. It was a joke, although I do know some programmers that will do that sort of thing. /wink.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':wink:' />

[DeeD]

Quick question that's not directly related to programming (more related to Math/CompSci), but this is the most relevant thread I'm aware of.

Is anyone familiar with derivatives of regular expressions (i.e., Brzozowski's derivatives)? A quick Google search didn't pull up anything useful and my prof did a terrible job of explaining it to us. And by that I mean he just wrote stuff on the chalk board expecting us to know what he was talking about (he does that alot). It seems like magic to me.

[Mrs. Patton]

I thought this worked in Java too but in c# all you have to do is

booleanVar = !booleanVar;

[Roisan Sweeney]

Yeah, that's always a risk. A good optimising compiler will do a lot of it for you anyway: not that I'm excusing sloppy code, but I have seen coders who like to be the sort of clever that can cause a maintenance headache...

For simple functions, inlines such as #defines can be quite useful replacements. At the other extreme, I remember working with some source code from "a well-known software vendor" 20 years back and I don't think before or since I've ever seen something that consisted of so many pointless and tangled calls to functions that did nothing other than call other functions. It was bizarre and quite headache-inducing.

[JLG]

That's kinda what I feel like whenever I download a piece of code and try to pick it apart. In my opinion if your function, class, whatever doesn't have at least five lines of code in it, it isn't worth using. All it does is make your code difficult to read.

On a different subject, this doesn't directly relate to programming but as an aspiring game developer I found this quite helpful.

http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2010/10/21/how-to-sell-your-game-online-without-using-an-app-store/

I took a glance at http://bmtmicro.com/. It's good to know that when I do decide to sell a game there are services out there that will handle all the DRM and money transactions for me. I really wasn't looking forward to dealing with that stuff myself.

[Guy Pearce]

Does anyone have experience writing plugins for XBMC? I tried to follow their tutorial but it did not make sense to me, and it looks like it does use an older version of Python so it should not be that hard. I am looking to write a couple for some image sites I use but cannot seem to wrap my head around it and am looking for some help if possible.

[Mandy Muir]

I get your point but that kinda depends. Some of my interface class definitions are really short. They are intended to work as a sort of code injection mechanism into a bigger class. They can have just the constructor, virtual destructor and a single action function. It's pure abstract, so there's no implementation in it and can really only consists of 5 lines. Not even the implementations that inherit from it are much more complex than that. Sometimes they need to be. The benefit is that I don't need to check some input mode variable within a tight loop, and instead I can inject the piece of code outside the loop.

When you add factories, multiple inheritance, managed c++ and all into this, yes, the resulting code can be a pain to read. You can only figure it out by debugging when not even the IDE can't help you out. It would just point you to the pure abstract interface class and you'd have to search for the references. At least I haven't found a proper way to interpret this kind of code in Visual Studio 2008.

I bet I could use a function pointer to plug in some changing functionality into a class too, but in my opinion that would be more difficult than taking advantage of some class with the implementation and instantiating that inside a smart pointer.. Note to self, document your code better.

Most of UI related functions can also consist of a single line as far as I've seen. You click a button, and it sets a local variable. Then you click OK and it runs some action function with possibly a few more lines. However, that's mostly because of how the programming interface connects the entities like buttons to functions through some event mechanism.

Can we agree on that the target length for a function would be something between 5 to 50 code lines to keep it maintainable? Longer functions are again less readable in my opinion.

[Kahli St Dennis]

*draws pentagram on ground*
*casts spell of thread revival*
IT LIVES!!!!

Okay... I am getting back into C, and my main problem is I can't for the life of me find a good video tutorial. I find either video tutorials that give you no background to the commands whatsoever, or I find hour long videos narrated by someone that might as well be Microsoft Sam. Does anyone know a good place for programming tutorials in general? I have found that cprogramming.com has a decent text-based one, but I would prefer a video based one.

I tried this once before, but the methods it taught me involved some really bad practices including system ("PAUSE") and other things.

If you can't help with that one, could someone help me with understanding boolean operators ( stuff like AND, OR, NOT.)? It is a bit fuzzy for me with the true and false outputs. IIRC, anything not 0 is considered true, and 0 is false. Is that right?

[Quick Draw]

That's correct, yes; though there's an exception which is that things like system calls often return a -1 to indicate a problem rather than 0, so something to watch out for.

In terms of tutorials, I found one of the most effective means of learning C was to dig through the Unix source code to see how some of the more simple system commands did stuff.

[Glu Glu]

So I found this: http://www.codecademy.com/#!/exercises/0

Its pretty neat.

[kyle pinchen]

Not exactly sure what you mean by that "PAUSE" bit, but it doesn't really matter what it is that you're writing as long as you're learning all of the right principles.

When I learned C, my dad had me use a development environment named Turbo C. It was running on an old DOS box, so my system resources were very limited by modern standards, but it was still an excellent platform to learn in because it was very simple. When a program started, the OS would just hand it control of the entire system, meaning that from that point forward it was just you and the machine. Very fun. In fact, I only started encountered problems with headroom when I started writing things like Wolfenstein 3D clones. /tongue.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':P' />

That's right. In one sense, however, the return value of a function can represent what's called an error code, and a return value of zero actually means "no error." It's an important distinction to make when you start making implicit references to function returns.

[Yvonne]

So I'm doing the courses on the website I mentioned earlier. The goal here is to print the value of "multiplied":


But I keep getting the error:
Make sure you log the value you get from timesTwo(). And it should be 8!


What am I missing?

EDIT: I got it.

[Lauren Denman]

So I'm thinking about throwing together a simple GUI to display some data I'm storing in some structs which can themselves contain an arbitrary number of nested structs.

I've been looking into things and can't really decide between wx or GTK+. Can anyone give a recommendation or help break down the differences more?

[kirsty williams]

https://github.com/EvilTosha/labirinth/blob/master/lab2.sh Yup.

[Madeleine Rose Walsh]

I'll have to give that a try later! Nice to see a bit of that sort of creativity again. /smile.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

[Heather Dawson]

http://sed.sourceforge.net/local/games/. Huh. Don't know which surprises me more. A game in sed or a game in bash.

[Queen Bitch]

Is there anyone who knows C# pretty that would like to look over some code for me? I just wrote a small application to go through a user's Steam installation folder and look for allt he DirectX, Visual C++ runtime, and XNA setups files and remove them (if the user wants). It appears to work on my machine but as we all know that is like testing in a bubble. I don't want to put this out even as an alpha just yet until I get a code review, even from a non professional, because I don't want to have missed something and cause a user's data to blow up. I could put a warning but we all know how well people listen to those.

If anyone is interested in testing this or looking at the code please PM me. The code seems safe to me but I can't be responsible for lost game files. It should ONLY affect the above listed files and nothign else. No steam data is gathered at all either.

[Siidney]

I plan to use Mercurial to do my version control so would you all suggest I host the projects I make on Google Code or SourceForge? I already have one on Google so may be better keeping it all in one place but I feel I should ask anyways. I plan to always GPL the code or maybe BSD license it and I know Google has restrictions.

[Matthew Barrows]

This is a really trivial question that doesn't deserve a thread of its own, so while it's not exactly about programming, it's close enough (?) ...

https://twitter.com/1pld/status/324368684896382978? And little hearts and hands and actual images of smiley faces?

[Anne marie]

As he said, Unicode. Specifically Unicode special characters and symbols. Wikipedia has lists of these that one can just copy/paste into most text-fields. Alternatively most rich-text editors should allow you to add them with an insert symbol option. Or you could learn the different codes and add the symbol by typing Alt+the four digit code in question.