Monkeyseesaw posted:

We need a language where the only data type is a string and when you do non-string operations like arithmetic it converts it to some internal representation, does the bit shuffling, and returns the result as a string. All functions are simply extending the string type.

But you still have to explicitly declare your variables as strings JUST TO MAKE SURE.

Ryouga Inverse posted:

This sounds great until you realize that it means you have to install Qt 3 and 4 side by side on any machine that you want to run Qt apps for an arbitrary amount of time, because there's always that one rear end in a top hat who wrote his poo poo for Qt 3 and then had the audacity to die or something.

I mean, there are arguments to be made for both, but you certainly can't change your API every time you have a whim, and in some cases (like the Internet) you can't ever break backward compatibility. And the problem is that those cases look exactly like the best-case success story that you only dream of.

Null Pointer posted:

IA-64 makes the compiler (or assembly programmer) responsible for almost everything, including instruction scheduling and data hazard resolution. The first Itanium chip was delayed for some years, in large part due to the fact that compilers turned out to be harder to write than the HP engineers thought. As far as I know the compilers still aren't very good.

dancavallaro posted:

I'm going to have to go with troll. Even if you are operating under the misconception that objects are passed by reference, it still wouldn't be "arbitrary".

haveblue posted:

Yes, you can use the const keyword to make the compiler enforce that.

hobbesmaster posted:

Sometimes its hard to tell if people are joking, but I've only ever seen XOR in my logic textbooks... it really doesn't matter but I have this twitch whenever I use ARM assembly.

Jabor posted:

1's complement and sign-magnitude are the other two options.

Also it doesn't guarantee that all possible bit patterns are actually valid.

Optimus Prime Ribs posted:

Everyone has their preferred way to write code.
But why should I be penalised for not conforming to the professor's preference?

That Turkey Story posted:

I think I still probably have some of the first code I've ever written on an old hard drive. I need to dig it up and post it at some point. I remember looking at it a couple of months after I'd written it and realizing how horrible and buggy and leaky it was. I can only imagine what I'd think of it now (over a decade later).

Freakus posted:

Note that mysql's utf8 doesn't support 4 byte characters. If you want that you need to use utf8mb4.

TheFreshmanWIT posted:

So here is an interesting defect that sorta plays into the UB discussion above. We write C++ code that runs on a few platforms, Win Desktop, WinRT, Android, and iOS. The result is we have a set of 'base' C++ code that compiles on every OS. One such component is an open source library that we've purchased a commerical (non GPL'ed) version of.

Dren posted:

I thought they were on the stack.

Gazpacho posted:

C++ code:

string fileContents;
readFileIntoString(filePath, fileContents);

unsigned long outBytes = 0;
const size_t bufSize = 16384;
unsigned char * in = (unsigned char *) malloc(fileContents.length());
unsigned char * out = (unsigned char *) malloc(bufSize);

memcpy(in, fileContents.c_str(), fileContents.length());
memset(out, NULL, bufSize);
someTransformation(in, fileContents.length(), out, bufSize, outBytes);
free(in);
in = NULL;
string s = string((char *) out);
free(out);
out = NULL;

The project is C++ but there was a dev on the team who always thought it should have been C instead. One way he expressed that was by writing code like this.

leper khan posted:

if (!(foo > 0)) {
..
}

Zombywuf posted:

Give it up, ADA is never going to be a thing outside the defence industry. Even there it's loosing ground: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_II

Munkeymon posted:

Ada isn't the language that either compiles and runs or, if you have any error, says 'No' without any explanation, right? I'd really like to clear that up if I have it wrong.

QuarkJets posted:

That's because the terminal that comes with OS X is garbage, whereas most Linux terminals are pretty good by default

Zopotantor posted:

[1] Currently on 4.1 since we're still using RHEL 5. Our customers are very, very conservative and need serious arm-twisting to agree to OS updates.

nielsm posted:

Sorry, no. It's Japanese for "my way or the highway".

Or in other terms, "really inflexible".

Dessert Rose posted:

Fundamental to C-family languages. Well, except C.

omeg posted:

I've been looking over the leaked win2k (?) sources some time ago and the biggest horror is the GUI subsystem. It was literally COMPATIBILITY HACK one after another. And it didn't change much. win32k.sys (the kernel part of window/GUI manager) is still one of the most exploited Windows components.

JawnV6 posted:

Can still invoke branching on some hardware. MSP430 sets it up as a case with fallthrough for anything between 1-7. For a variable it does an indirect jump.

Plorkyeran posted:

Rust is the only one of those three that is a system language without GC.

b0lt posted:

bzip2 is a decade old project that supports all sorts of awful platforms

ctz posted:

That struct was introduced in Windows 95 Service Release 2 (1996). I think that's distant past with respect to computing.

fritz posted:

If the compiler puts debugging symbols in the binary, longer variable names will mean that it takes longer for the os to load the executable from disk and it adds to memory pressure

GrumpyDoctor posted:

I guess I'm nervous about trusting not-required-by-standard C++ behavior that just happens to be implemented by all major compilers (which I didn't actually know, so that's cool).

GrumpyDoctor posted:

Right. But some languages do guarantee tail-call elimination; it's not an "optimization," it's the semantics of the language.

Blotto Skorzany posted:

2-byte floats?!

shodanjr_gr posted:

qntm posted:

VERY CAREFULLY

TheresaJayne posted:

NotOnMyOS (NOMOS)- this language will not run under any operating system as it classes them all as waste of space, uses hardware directly

Suspicious Dish posted:

Fortran? The language where everything is global and you can redefine a number literal with a SWAP procedure?

LeftistMuslimObama posted:

I guess what confuses me, though, is why there isn't a command that's just "Make a new process with this program/function and these arguments and then link it to me as a child". It seems like it would do the same thing as fork()+exec() with fewer lines of code, unless the lecturer for my class simply didn't explain the nuances well at all.

kitten smoothie posted:

Older devices? Zawinski was blogging just a few months ago about lovely cheap Android "smart tv" boxes that all had the same MAC address burned into them. Seemed like a cheap way to run advertising on a TV screen except you can have only one

http://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/10/flyer-screens-2/

Volmarias posted:

I can assure you that "refactoring" wouldn't have solved the issue, because despite looking simple on the surface, Kindle Reader is actually really complicated and has to deal with a bunch of older formats basically forever.

Suspicious Dish posted:

Wait, that means that if I attach a debugger to an existing process, the thread names won't be there? What the gently caress?

Suspicious Dish posted:

For however bad X11 is, lmao at anybody thinking NeWS is any better. NeWS involved people writing custom PostScript scripts to shove inside a giant rear end display server, get access to the entire global namespace, even do filesystem and network operations. Not to mention that they added a way to load NeWS at runtime from an untrusted source. So you could just randomly pwn some machines on your network by sending them malicious PostScript scripts that were self-replicating and inserted them into your system at boot.

omeg posted:

For those not familiar with winapi, it's basically initiating an asynchronous write (to a pipe) and then... just waiting for the completion. It can be replaced with a single synchronous WriteFile() call.

JawnV6 posted:

I'd be curious to see what a peek at the disassembly revealed. Guessing the 90's gcc is using the x87 FP stack that a modern processor will dutifully execute much slower than an equivalent SSE-enabled flow.