The main difference between forking and threading approaches is one of operating system architecture. Back in the days when Unix was designed, forking was an easy, simple system that answered the mainframe and server type requirements best, as such it was popularized on the Unix systems. When Microsoft re-architected the NT kernel from scratch, it … Read more
Estimating how long something like that might take is dependent on many different factors. For example, an experienced programmer can easily knock out a simple arithmetic expression evaluator in a couple of hours, with unit tests. But a novice programmer may have to learn about parsing techniques, recursive descent, abstract representation of expression trees, tree-walking … Read more
Inefficient, but I think clear. public static string CommaQuibbling(IEnumerable<string> items) { List<String> list = new List<String>(items); if (list.Count == 0) { return “{}”; } if (list.Count == 1) { return “{” + list[0] + “}”; } String[] initial = list.GetRange(0, list.Count – 1).ToArray(); return “{” + String.Join(“, “, initial) + ” and ” + list[list.Count … Read more
Magic numbers are any number in your code that isn’t immediately obvious to someone with very little knowledge. For example, the following piece of code: sz = sz + 729; has a magic number in it and would be far better written as: sz = sz + CAPACITY_INCREMENT; Some extreme views state that you should … Read more
Covariance is pretty simple and best thought of from the perspective of some collection class List. We can parameterize the List class with some type parameter T. That is, our list contains elements of type T for some T. List would be covariant if S is a subtype of T iff List[S] is a subtype … Read more
The answer is yes, but the solution is a little tricky. The System.Reflection.Emit namespace defines types that allows assemblies to be generated dynamically. They also allow the generated assemblies to be defined incrementally. In other words it is possible to add types to the dynamic assembly, execute the generated code, and then latter add more … Read more
You can do it like this: class Example { private $__readOnly = ‘hello world’; function __get($name) { if($name === ‘readOnly’) return $this->__readOnly; user_error(“Invalid property: ” . __CLASS__ . “->$name”); } function __set($name, $value) { user_error(“Can’t set property: ” . __CLASS__ . “->$name”); } } Only use this when you really need it – it is … Read more
Declarative programming is when you write your code in such a way that it describes what you want to do, and not how you want to do it. It is left up to the compiler to figure out the how. Examples of declarative programming languages are SQL and Prolog.
Functional languages use a different paradigm than imperative and object-oriented languages. They use side-effect-free functions as a basic building block in the language. This enables lots of things and makes a lot of things more difficult (or in most cases different from what people are used to). One of the biggest advantages with functional programming … Read more
When not specified, C++ is unmanaged C++, compiled to machine code. In unmanaged C++ you must manage memory allocation manually. Managed C++ is a language invented by Microsoft, that compiles to bytecode run by the .NET Framework. It uses mostly the same syntax as C++ (hence the name) but is compiled in the same way … Read more