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Ask Slashdot: What Are the Strangest Features of Various Programming Languages?
itwbennett writes: Every programming language has its own unique quirks, such as weird syntax, unusual functionality or non-standard implementations -- things that can cause developers new to the language, or even seasoned pros, to scratch their heads in wonder (or throw their hands up in despair). Phil Johnson has rounded up some of the strangest — from the + operator in JavaScript to the trigraphs in C and C++ and indentation level in Python. What programming language oddities cause you the most grief?"
-eq as the equality operator in Powershell is pretty odd.
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Lua's standard is, for things like arrays, to start counting from 1. The unlearning of old habits made this a hard adjustment.
I used to think that Perl's feature of "There's More Than One Way To Do It" was great until I had to start modifying and maintaining the code of other developers, (several over the years). 20+ years I've been with Perl and I gotta say that through the years this has probably caused me more frustration than anything. Python, comparatively speaking, is a dominatrix and I'm starting to enjoy "There's Only One Way To Do It".
Many of us have read the PHP is a fractal of bad design article and a commonly cited rebuttal. I tried to reconcile the two and ended up with about a half dozen legit complaints.
False and True are variables and you can assign one to the other. False = True print False Not that anyone sane would do this in real code, but the thought is still scary.
use whitespace. Be warned, several problems have been reported when posting source code to the internet.
The difference is that the "+" operator in a strong-typed language works without causing nasty surprises for you.
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That's a list of very strange language features. Unsurprisingly, Javascript makes many, many appearances.
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if (a = b) assigns the contents of b to a and executes the code following if b 0. Who the hell thought that would be a good idea?
If b is an expression that returns a reference to a newly allocated resource, such as fopen or malloc, this if statement represents trying to allocate a resource and then skipping the following compound statement if the allocation failed. It's what they had before exceptions, and it's what they still have on microcontrollers too small to have the overhead of a full-featured exception handler.
strings terminated by a binary zero rather than their physical size. Who the hell thought that would be a good idea?
Probably the same way that most popular operating systems store text files as a list of lines separated by newline characters, encoded as 0x0A on UNIX or Windows but 0x0D on Apple II or classic Mac OS. VMS is an exception in that its "non-stream" text files have each line prefixed by its length.
I always liked the target-first approach of Intel. Like strcpy(dst, src). I know I'm mucking with (dst) string, and not doing anything with (src). The same with (MOV %eax, 0xdeadbeef).
Imagine strcpy(src,dst), which many people would say is more logical because you're saying "Perform a string copy from (src) to (dst)." We say "Copy from source to destination" all the time--it's how we think, right? And then: strncpy(src,dst,32). So with strcpy(), the last argument is the thing we mess with; while strncpy() it's some argument in the middle.
This is why strcpy(dst,src) and strncpy(dst,src,len) are set: the first argument is the target. These calls immediately tell you what they actually change. printf() changes nothing, but uses the first argument as its format--it emits a modified content of the first argument based on subsequent arguments; sprintf() changes the first argument to a modified copy of the second argument using all further arguments. If something is changed, it's the first things that are changed.
In Intel assembly, a glance down the left side of the screen rapidly tells you what's roughly going on. You don't need to read the whole line; you just look at opcodes and targets, quickly recognizing which opcodes modify their targets. This immediately tells you flow; and attaching the source data for the modification provides you with logic. This is less decoding than trying to interpret an individual opcode, rearrange it in your head, extract its behavior, extract its logic, and build incrementally with that.
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Nonsense. C is a more elegant weapon for a more civilized age. It's a shame that mass-produced coders have to rely on blasters.
I believe none of you actually programmed in C. A string terminated by \0 can be represented by a single pointer and an have any length. You can also easily let the string keep growing (until the allocated memory is finished.) That is the epitome of KISS. If you use an 8 byte character at the beginning then you are limited to a string length of 255. A structure with a length and a string pointer (or a character array) is much more complex and that would reflect in more complex library functions.
C was invented by exceptionally bright people. For a language that was primarily designed to program kernels its remarkably versatile. If you are seeking a language to write administrative applications then you should look further. COBOL back in the days or Java nowadays would suit you better. And yes, there is a difference in programming prowess between kernel / library programmers and application programmers. The latter "just" have to get the business logic going and are allowed to use every trick in the book. The former must be very concise and consider that their code will be used by a huge amount of other programs.
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