Then they should stop making third grade errors. Or maybe get off of slashdot, where they can't do anything about other people but whine, whine, whine.
> And that's deadly fucking accurate.
What, do you haunt me now? For each of my last few posts, an AC (the same one?) has been pulling quotes from other posts, getting mdoded down to 0 each and every time.
Use a name, ya coward.
> There's this funny thing called shutting the > fuck up.
Heh. You should consider it yourself. No go home, little boy, you impress nobody.
It's an urban legend born of truth. They did indeed get a zero G pen developed for them (by pentel, IIRC, been a long time since the tour) at the cost of $5k.
This is not the first time something craftmanslike can beat something sofisticated.
The problem with dropping the same word over and over again in effort to seem sophisticated is that it never works. However, it carries a subtle added risk, in that when over the course of one paragraph and three disconsolate chunks you use one word nine times, a spelling problem (certainly not the only one) can just look abominable.
Here's a hint: there are these wacky things called synonyms. They can keep you from sounding like a scratched record.
As far as I could tell, stonecypher appeared to be using overwhelming, excessive, way-over-the-top sarcasm to make a point. And you still missed it:-).
That's redundant, repetetive, reiterative, and deadly fucking accurate. You might just be the next MC Hawking. Mad word. Keep the S/N high.
When you use the correct word, you evoke subtleties for intelligent readers. Also, you attract the enmity of morons who follow you around slashdot trying to make you look bad with third grade snips at the way you talk and how people around you supposedly must react.
And, no, I don't seem to have many real world social issues; still, yes, when I criticize people for bad argument, especially in online forums which allow anonymity, I do get tweakers (not the techie meaning) every so often.
Rather than stalking me, you should consider trying to come up with something worth saying.
Like you think you're too good to express yourself in more common terms.
I'm sure when you learn the words (that is, from usage, not from your dictionary) you'll understand why I chose them, and not things you could find in a beer commercial.
So basically, you're rehashing the rest of my message while appearing to argue with me. I'm unclear as to what exactly I said that you disagree with, quite frankly.
No, I'm going quite counter to what I interpret you as having said. Perhaps I'm misreading you?
What I took you to have said was this: all languages have the same basic functionality (turing equivalence.) Because higher level functionality translates to ease of use, (original poster) is comparing the ease of use of C++ with Java and C#.
I take umbrage with this. Yes, the third paragraph is a tipping of the hat to what you said: that one wouldn't want to recreate extant systems and reinvent wheels wherever they went. In that paragraph and that paragraph alone, I agree with you.
You should read the part where it says "so, look, there's more to it still." It doesn't matter if you roll a thread system for C or C++, it's not going to become uniform, because there's too much competition. Similarly, mutexes, critical sections and other resource locks, interfaces to major resources - networks, databases/warehouses, etc - won't be unified. (The C++0x committee was talking about TCP and directories being added to the language; this scares me badly. I think it's a mistake.)
What I was saying was different - and maybe I should have been more specific about this - was that languages offering certain features as base functionality define what can and what cannot be expected to interoperate across seperately developed software. I have long since believed that C/C++ staying far away from platform dependant stuff was a huge design consideration - one that I supported once I started doing embedded - and that as a result it had the potential for portability to platforms that silly little languages like Java had no chance on. Just try writing a GameBoy Advance game in Java.
So, no, I'm not rehashing. I'm either misunderstanding you or disagreeing with you. It's to you to figure out which.
And besides (I resisted saying this before but won't now) it's not C++ that's responsible for all those holes. It's bad development practice. QMail is C. The fact of the matter is that most programmers are sloppy, and are more interested with making it work than making it robust. We need better practice, better idioms, better understanding of vulnerabilities, and management that understands that meeting a deadline should come with hardening, not with stability, before this profession can be called an engineering discipline.
Managers that want salability instead of proof are the real problem. And until we have a way of displaying hardening, they can't turn hardening into a selling point. Having a metric for resilience was what made resilience a responsibility. Don't complain. Work on the problem.
(Also, a pile of hacks glued together with cruft? I challenge you to defend that with concrete examples rather than your sesquipedalianic "hyperbole", and to not turn bright red when I throw things like PL/I in your face. Have a look at the MFC, the Mac OS8 API, the Winders ME API, or Linux 2.something . C++ is anything but hackish when you've been in the real world. Can you name a language that's anywhere near as flexible that isn't so cobbled together besides Ruby or Smalltalk? Oh, wait, there's so much they don't do. Do I need to keep giving examples, or will the sarcasm hit home early on?)
You're probably right about the parent, but these barbs make you sound like a snotty little asshole.
That's astonishingly self referential. Good thing you're an AC.
BTW, it's intentional. I get annoyed when people complain about things that a page of reading would have stifled. It's a waste of bandwidth and a raising of S/N (which in turn is just another waste of bandwidth.)
but you don't run across it much in the business world and never have
That's funny, I do. Or at least I used to. It seems (unfortunately) to be dying. The.NET marketing platform won, no surprise.
and Perl/Python/Java/VB/tcl will always be better glue then C++
I'll give you Perl and tcl. Arguably, Python. But VB? Java? Have you ever tried to use Java as glue? Why didn't you name PHP, Lua, bash, etc?
(PHP is krazyglue. It's got every other language and major app on earth in a hard hat stuck to the underside of the c++ girder. And if you give them money, you get a seriously balls to the wall optimizer. Pity about the way it handles objects, but the way it handles variables almost makes up for it.)
Java, by the way, was designed to be hardened styrofoam bricks, not glue. Why hardened styrofoam? Because you can use it for support, or a wall, or insulation, or it'll float in water - that is, it runs pretty much anywhere, but isn't great for any of them. If you want it in a small bucket or low gravity (tiny systems) you have to hollow it out (J2ME) and if you want it as a really hardened wall you need to add all sorts of struts and support (tomcat, beans, JavaFeces.)
Java's a good ideal. It's good for some people. To me, it's like visual studio: it tries to do too much for me, and I don't like it. I'm a control freak. Besides: AWT. (I mean, really, I'd be making fun of swing, but... AWT? Someone thought that would be a good idea?)
What I would really like to see in C++ would be compile-time exception enforcement ALA Java.
Would be nice, wouldn't it? There's a problem: C++ has lots of things that make this outright impossible. I brought this up on #c++ on efNet once, and it was explained to me in a way that made sense for about an hour and fourty five monutes (don't pretend like that's never happened to you.)
This is an open plea to someone better at C++ than I am: please explain why compile-time exceptions in C++ aren't possible, or alternately explain why I'm wrong.
lambdas and metafunctions: boost and spirit. However, I agree with you that they should become core langauge fetaures. Notably, that's what Boost is - a group that's working on implementing, in a rigorous and standard-friendly fashion, potential extensions. it's droolworthy; I'd say even moreso than Loki, though visible policies make other people's code far less painful. (Yay, Phoenix!)
As far as type inference, I disagree.
cParentClass * foo = new cChildClass();
what's the redundancy of cFoo = new Foo(); ? You specify the type of the thing and then identify the creator and pass it information. Because you always have matched types and creators simply says that your code doesn't require some of the more complex leveraging of the language.
Auto seems convenient at first, but consider the potential for problems. And really, what does it gain you? Five or six keystrokes, in the greater scheme of things, really just isn't that important. Predictability and specificity are, in my opinion, far more important.
If you're so hard up for horizontal space that you can't make a single definition, stop tabbing 8 spaces, put a using or two in place, or get a bigger monitor. Jeez.
It's time for c++ to move into the 90s and get rid of the preprocessor.
I said that right up until I really learned some of the disgustingly funquadelic stuff you can do with the preprocessor. The problem isn't so much that the facility is there as it is that it's used as an excuse not to introduce useful features into the compiler. #pragma is the same way; how many times have you seen ifdef guards and pragma once, and longed for PHP's include_once() and require_once() ?
That said, just wait until you have a reason to want to embed binary data as ascii into source code without external tools doing some magic hokery parsing for you behind the scenes. The preprocessor is used to create pre-magic magic that makes source that a human should never have to type out or understand. When you do embedded programming without a giant toolchain (that is, pretty much any time you use GCC for reasons other than money or linux activism) you find that macros are a wonderful tool.
I'm with you: burn all #define foo 10 in favor of enums or a real language feature. get rid of ifdef guards. But don't nuke a useful tool.
But yet, it seems that the standards bodies don't seem to take acutual usage of the last set of changes into account before proposing the next set of standards.
Once you read that talk, you'll see that that's the topic of one of the seven major sections of the talk. Specifically, how to avoid the subtle behavior changes colliding with existing code, and the debacle that inconsistent support has created in the past. In fact, the apparent reason that there's been so little aggressive development in 97-01 was to allow a lull for stability and compliance to catch up.
So be sure to read what people are saying before you complain about what they never talk about, mmkay?
This sort of statement bugs me. A lot. First, all "real" programming languages are equally powerful -- they are all Turing-equivalent
This sort of statement bugs me. It's a bit like saying that a Ferrari and a Tyco R/C are equally powerful, because they can both be used to drive a weight load from the house to the grocery store and back.
The fact of the matter is that there's a little more to it than Turing equivalence. Sure, you could write a massively OO object exchange system in Assembly, or a language metaparser in Visual Basic, or just about anything in Befunge. They're all turing equivalent. For that matter, so is morse code to an interpreter with an abacus over tin cans and string.
That said, in the real world we need reasonable tools to facilitate development. I have neither the time nor the patience to reinvent each and every wheel in what I make. There's a question of skill: how many of us could remake some of these mechanisms as efficiently, rigorously, or bereft of side effects (hell, even of bugs) as they currently are?
Ahem, at least if you're not using VC. Scoping problems on for indices, indeed. If you don't know about it, google about it before flaming me, fucktards; it's a known bug with such a history that it's an option in VC.NET that actually comes shipped as default wrong. Borktastic.
So, look, there's more to it still. Sure, writing in assembly is as turing as writing in Scheme and Haskell. But, look, let's play with C++ for a minute. Because C++ has generic programming that works in one fashion for/everyone/, then this person's template is gonna work with that other person's object. Yeah, if we were idiots, we could all each roll our own each time, but then pretty things like algorithms and iterators and so forth would be a dream.
The fact of the matter is that if turing equivalence mattered, we'd all still be bootstrapping our mainframes with paper clips. And assembly is dead as an application writing language for a damned good reason.
Now go back to writing VB and telling yourself that it's no different than C++. We understand.
- Fatty, King of Contention, Arrogantest Ever (tm)
I think what C and C++ really lack is the option to turn on array range checking.
I wrote a range checked class in eight lines, but the Slashdot lameness filter won't let me post it. There're examples in Effective C++ (start with M18.)
Granted it's not part of the fundamental language, but it's not hard to implement, and with some creativity it can apply to nearly every situation that can't already be covered with enums.
The old joke is that the language always should have been called ++c, but that since features were tacked on rather than planned in, that postincrement is maybe the best expression of what happened.
Frankly, I'm rooting for "P". D, indeed. Like you guys don't know why there wasn't an "A".
> The problem being there is no way to tell how > old the person who checks the email address is.
Why is this a problem? The reason you don't get pornographic snail mail is that you can't determine the age of the recipient safely. The reason you don't see playboy in vending machine s(in this country - yay italy!) is that you can't guarantee the age of the purchaser. That's the reason you don't see cigarettes and booze in vending machines, too.
Frankly, I don't give a rat's ass what a spammer can and cannot predict. If they do not know for certain that the email address may safely be targeted for their scum, their consumption of bandwidth that the unwilling recipient pays for, then oh fucking well, go get a god damned job.
> An email address is just an alias
Wrong. An email address *can* be an alias. However, I have a number of email addresses which go solely to me. If I were foolish enough to say to a spammer that such-and-such an address is safe and a legitimate endpoint for adult mail, then the responsibility would be mine to keep it so, and the spammer would be absolved of responsibility regarding age authentication. However, the problem isn't those spammers, the spammers that pretend to opt you in; the problem is the spammers that harvest your address, sell to it at random, and end up sending my six year old daughter offers for cock pills and nigerian bank accounts.
> The person who checks that box could be 8 or > 80, there is no way to tell.
This is due to a flawed, predatory business model. As soon as their customers are willing, this will become a nonissue.
> Unless there is some way to tell how old the > person who checks the mailbox is,
User verification. We've had it in use since ancient times.
> there is no way to hold people responsible for > sending emails inappropriate for children to > that mailbox.
Baloney. The person which puts age restricted material into a public vending machine is responsible. Why should the spammer not be?
> You can send porn to a physical mailbox
Not without a customer request, you cannot. Be sure to ask the attorney general about this one on your day in court.
> and the person who gets the mail may be a > minor, but you can't be held responsible for > that minor seeing "inappropriate" material.
You really should learn how the law works; there are in fact half a dozen cases in which precedents were set about this very issue, back in the 1960s. Not only can they be held for the minor seeing inappropriate material, but they should be.
The solution for physical mail is simple: plain brown wrapper with someone's name on it, and at the company's choice maybe identifying marks. They're not saying you can't mail the mailbox; they're saying you have to take measures to make sure that the delivery is secure. If someone opens mail not intended for them, then the delivery system has been hijacked, and it's not the company's fault anymore.
Just try to get a penthouse without said wrapper.
> They should e charged for sending spam (where > applicable) but trying to prosecute them > because they are sending mail to an emailbox > where a child has access is very slippery, > because there is no way to know who the box > belongs to.
Yah, that's the thing about American law. If a company decides to do something when they can't tell if it will cause problems, but when there's a signficant risk, they are held indemnable.
Cluestick: law books are cheap. Get one or library one before commenting again.
I don't want the new AGB. An Afterburner looks just as good as the official frontlight (it's not a backlight, folks.) The battery pack can be bought for $15 as an accessory. The SP is too small for big hands, and has no headphone jack.
I wouldn't buy an original AGB at this point; modding isn't a particularly good answer for many, but this is slashdot, so why throw things away?
> I'm suprised Nintendo is waiting until September to release it in the 'states.
Go to Best Buy. Sure, it's gonna be until September that they'll be in stock, but the article is about how they came out 10 weeks ago. It goes on to talk about which retailers have them.
I mean, I can see talking about something that the article linked to without reading it, because you're lazy and want to sound clueful. But couldn't you at least read the slashdot article?
I find this article curious, given that it's been less than two days since the article about all of those Motorola wearable smart devices.
I'm with the guy from the front of the message queue that said that the article is silly, based on that it argues that Bluetooth has failed by not addressing concerns that are counter to its design princip,les. Bluetooth doesn't work for WANs because it's a PAN connection - personal area network. It's intended to help you get rid of very small wires that connect chunks of distributed devices together - headphones to CD players are the common example.
My belief is that Bluetooth is still a bit too early. It's good that it's becoming ubiquitous now; still, if more PCs included it by default (I mean come on, guys, ethernet cards are really not that useful to most people; how many people run LANs in their home, or have a cable modem/dsl modem that isn't a PCI card or USB device?) it'd start to really take off. PDAs should drop IR. It's stupid.
Look, the real problem is that nobody really understands just how useful watches that can display broadcast data are, right now. There are three reasons:
Oone, it's not pervasive enough to make a useful advantage. Once stock tickers and email come across a watch conveniently, tha'tll begin to change.
Two, it's too rare (currently nonexistant, soon to be too expensive, later to be reasonable.) I mean, how long did it take Palm to break the $100 barrier? A parent can get a GameBoy for $70. If Palm got off of its ass while it still had money and funded some game developers, things would have been different. The early adopters aren't technophiles; there aren't enough of us to matter in the economic sense. They're businesspeople and kids - the people that want toys and don't have to worry about money.
Three, there's the Star Trek factor. Everyone on SlashDot, in my opinion, gets this ass backwards; we tend to forget that we're in the minority. Nobody else wants to look like they walked off of the set of Star Trek. Look at music videos. Look at fashion shows. Go to a high school football game, a rave, or just out in the sun somewhere. (Those of you who have friends that aren't sure where to find the sun should offer assistance; we all know at least one of them, and despite being transparent and having Gollum eyes, they're people too.) You will not find anything more complex than a Palm Pilot.
Oh, by the way, a hint to you designers out there: I was watching some B science fiction show on Sci Fi at 4 in the morning last night, and one of their props - a hologram projector, by the looks of it - was a palm pilot with a silver spray painted shell. This is bad. You still haven't made something that looks normal. Remove thumb from ass and try again until you get it right, please. I love my palm pilot, and I've owned more than one of them, starting with a Palm 1000, and you know what? I still think it looks silly. Also, you can't use it to play games. The buttons were laid out by someone with no hands, I'm quite certain.
Bluetooth isn't dead. It doesn't have its market yet. Look how well it's doing when we can't even come up with anything better than headphones to explain what it's for.
Then so did the consumers. You ever had to endure the tenth explanation of Priceline by someone which fundamentally doesn't understand it, all the way to LA?
> Anyone else find this to be a reasonable > thumbrule?
Generally in the case of a programmer which knows one and not the other, yes. And to know a language isn't to be able to write it, manual in hand, but rather to have used it for four years to do things it wasn't meant to for a PHB that doesn't know dick.
(IE, to be my coworker. Grumble.)
If a programmer knows both, they'll use idioms from either in the other. What you're seeing are language tendencies being embodied in programmers which don't have alternatives, IMNSHO.
> Clever programmers use Lisp, Scheme and Haskell. > > Smart programmers use whatever language the > market's hiring, and don't get caught up on > language wars.
Clever programmers use something new every eight months. Employed programmers use whatever's being hired for. Smart programmers use whatever language suits the job best.
Language wars may be stupid, but language selection isn't. You translate an unknown natural language with Prolog. You build web services with PHP, perl, lisp, xslt. You build embedded applications in C++, C, or in extreme cases assembly.
You do not write embedded Scheme, ml for the Web, or Prolog to keep simple databases.
And besides, there is Only One Truth (tm) to language wars: Java Sucks.
"During National Brotherhood Week..." - Tom Lehrer
Slashdot Mirror
> People don't like being corrected or berated.
Then they should stop making third grade errors. Or maybe get off of slashdot, where they can't do anything about other people but whine, whine, whine.
> And that's deadly fucking accurate.
What, do you haunt me now? For each of my last few posts, an AC (the same one?) has been pulling quotes from other posts, getting mdoded down to 0 each and every time.
Use a name, ya coward.
> There's this funny thing called shutting the
> fuck up.
Heh. You should consider it yourself. No go home, little boy, you impress nobody.
AOL is already the biggest CD distributor already, with the most CD's in the most homes (and trash cans.)
BMG? Columbia House?
It's an urban legend born of truth. They did indeed get a zero G pen developed for them (by pentel, IIRC, been a long time since the tour) at the cost of $5k.
Turns out that's not much for a pen.
This is not the first time something craftmanslike can beat something sofisticated.
The problem with dropping the same word over and over again in effort to seem sophisticated is that it never works. However, it carries a subtle added risk, in that when over the course of one paragraph and three disconsolate chunks you use one word nine times, a spelling problem (certainly not the only one) can just look abominable.
Here's a hint: there are these wacky things called synonyms. They can keep you from sounding like a scratched record.
As far as I could tell, stonecypher appeared to be using overwhelming, excessive, way-over-the-top sarcasm to make a point. And you still missed it :-).
That's redundant, repetetive, reiterative, and deadly fucking accurate. You might just be the next MC Hawking. Mad word. Keep the S/N high.
Do you talk like that too?
When you use the correct word, you evoke subtleties for intelligent readers. Also, you attract the enmity of morons who follow you around slashdot trying to make you look bad with third grade snips at the way you talk and how people around you supposedly must react.
And, no, I don't seem to have many real world social issues; still, yes, when I criticize people for bad argument, especially in online forums which allow anonymity, I do get tweakers (not the techie meaning) every so often.
Rather than stalking me, you should consider trying to come up with something worth saying.
Like you think you're too good to express yourself in more common terms.
I'm sure when you learn the words (that is, from usage, not from your dictionary) you'll understand why I chose them, and not things you could find in a beer commercial.
So basically, you're rehashing the rest of my message while appearing to argue with me. I'm unclear as to what exactly I said that you disagree with, quite frankly.
No, I'm going quite counter to what I interpret you as having said. Perhaps I'm misreading you?
What I took you to have said was this: all languages have the same basic functionality (turing equivalence.) Because higher level functionality translates to ease of use, (original poster) is comparing the ease of use of C++ with Java and C#.
I take umbrage with this. Yes, the third paragraph is a tipping of the hat to what you said: that one wouldn't want to recreate extant systems and reinvent wheels wherever they went. In that paragraph and that paragraph alone, I agree with you.
You should read the part where it says "so, look, there's more to it still." It doesn't matter if you roll a thread system for C or C++, it's not going to become uniform, because there's too much competition. Similarly, mutexes, critical sections and other resource locks, interfaces to major resources - networks, databases/warehouses, etc - won't be unified. (The C++0x committee was talking about TCP and directories being added to the language; this scares me badly. I think it's a mistake.)
What I was saying was different - and maybe I should have been more specific about this - was that languages offering certain features as base functionality define what can and what cannot be expected to interoperate across seperately developed software. I have long since believed that C/C++ staying far away from platform dependant stuff was a huge design consideration - one that I supported once I started doing embedded - and that as a result it had the potential for portability to platforms that silly little languages like Java had no chance on. Just try writing a GameBoy Advance game in Java.
So, no, I'm not rehashing. I'm either misunderstanding you or disagreeing with you. It's to you to figure out which.
And besides (I resisted saying this before but won't now) it's not C++ that's responsible for all those holes. It's bad development practice. QMail is C. The fact of the matter is that most programmers are sloppy, and are more interested with making it work than making it robust. We need better practice, better idioms, better understanding of vulnerabilities, and management that understands that meeting a deadline should come with hardening, not with stability, before this profession can be called an engineering discipline.
Managers that want salability instead of proof are the real problem. And until we have a way of displaying hardening, they can't turn hardening into a selling point. Having a metric for resilience was what made resilience a responsibility. Don't complain. Work on the problem.
(Also, a pile of hacks glued together with cruft? I challenge you to defend that with concrete examples rather than your sesquipedalianic "hyperbole", and to not turn bright red when I throw things like PL/I in your face. Have a look at the MFC, the Mac OS8 API, the Winders ME API, or Linux 2.something . C++ is anything but hackish when you've been in the real world. Can you name a language that's anywhere near as flexible that isn't so cobbled together besides Ruby or Smalltalk? Oh, wait, there's so much they don't do. Do I need to keep giving examples, or will the sarcasm hit home early on?)
You're probably right about the parent, but these barbs make you sound like a snotty little asshole.
That's astonishingly self referential. Good thing you're an AC.
BTW, it's intentional. I get annoyed when people complain about things that a page of reading would have stifled. It's a waste of bandwidth and a raising of S/N (which in turn is just another waste of bandwidth.)
but you don't run across it much in the business world and never have
.NET marketing platform won, no surprise.
... AWT? Someone thought that would be a good idea?)
That's funny, I do. Or at least I used to. It seems (unfortunately) to be dying. The
and Perl/Python/Java/VB/tcl will always be better glue then C++
I'll give you Perl and tcl. Arguably, Python. But VB? Java? Have you ever tried to use Java as glue? Why didn't you name PHP, Lua, bash, etc?
(PHP is krazyglue. It's got every other language and major app on earth in a hard hat stuck to the underside of the c++ girder. And if you give them money, you get a seriously balls to the wall optimizer. Pity about the way it handles objects, but the way it handles variables almost makes up for it.)
Java, by the way, was designed to be hardened styrofoam bricks, not glue. Why hardened styrofoam? Because you can use it for support, or a wall, or insulation, or it'll float in water - that is, it runs pretty much anywhere, but isn't great for any of them. If you want it in a small bucket or low gravity (tiny systems) you have to hollow it out (J2ME) and if you want it as a really hardened wall you need to add all sorts of struts and support (tomcat, beans, JavaFeces.)
Java's a good ideal. It's good for some people. To me, it's like visual studio: it tries to do too much for me, and I don't like it. I'm a control freak. Besides: AWT. (I mean, really, I'd be making fun of swing, but
What I would really like to see in C++ would be compile-time exception enforcement ALA Java.
Would be nice, wouldn't it? There's a problem: C++ has lots of things that make this outright impossible. I brought this up on #c++ on efNet once, and it was explained to me in a way that made sense for about an hour and fourty five monutes (don't pretend like that's never happened to you.)
This is an open plea to someone better at C++ than I am: please explain why compile-time exceptions in C++ aren't possible, or alternately explain why I'm wrong.
lambdas and metafunctions: boost and spirit. However, I agree with you that they should become core langauge fetaures. Notably, that's what Boost is - a group that's working on implementing, in a rigorous and standard-friendly fashion, potential extensions. it's droolworthy; I'd say even moreso than Loki, though visible policies make other people's code far less painful. (Yay, Phoenix!)
As far as type inference, I disagree.
cParentClass * foo = new cChildClass();
what's the redundancy of cFoo = new Foo(); ? You specify the type of the thing and then identify the creator and pass it information. Because you always have matched types and creators simply says that your code doesn't require some of the more complex leveraging of the language.
Auto seems convenient at first, but consider the potential for problems. And really, what does it gain you? Five or six keystrokes, in the greater scheme of things, really just isn't that important. Predictability and specificity are, in my opinion, far more important.
If you're so hard up for horizontal space that you can't make a single definition, stop tabbing 8 spaces, put a using or two in place, or get a bigger monitor. Jeez.
It's time for c++ to move into the 90s and get rid of the preprocessor.
I said that right up until I really learned some of the disgustingly funquadelic stuff you can do with the preprocessor. The problem isn't so much that the facility is there as it is that it's used as an excuse not to introduce useful features into the compiler. #pragma is the same way; how many times have you seen ifdef guards and pragma once, and longed for PHP's include_once() and require_once() ?
That said, just wait until you have a reason to want to embed binary data as ascii into source code without external tools doing some magic hokery parsing for you behind the scenes. The preprocessor is used to create pre-magic magic that makes source that a human should never have to type out or understand. When you do embedded programming without a giant toolchain (that is, pretty much any time you use GCC for reasons other than money or linux activism) you find that macros are a wonderful tool.
I'm with you: burn all #define foo 10 in favor of enums or a real language feature. get rid of ifdef guards. But don't nuke a useful tool.
I haven't read all the proposals
We know.
But yet, it seems that the standards bodies don't seem to take acutual usage of the last set of changes into account before proposing the next set of standards.
Once you read that talk, you'll see that that's the topic of one of the seven major sections of the talk. Specifically, how to avoid the subtle behavior changes colliding with existing code, and the debacle that inconsistent support has created in the past. In fact, the apparent reason that there's been so little aggressive development in 97-01 was to allow a lull for stability and compliance to catch up.
So be sure to read what people are saying before you complain about what they never talk about, mmkay?
This sort of statement bugs me. A lot. First, all "real" programming languages are equally powerful -- they are all Turing-equivalent
/everyone/, then this person's template is gonna work with that other person's object. Yeah, if we were idiots, we could all each roll our own each time, but then pretty things like algorithms and iterators and so forth would be a dream.
This sort of statement bugs me. It's a bit like saying that a Ferrari and a Tyco R/C are equally powerful, because they can both be used to drive a weight load from the house to the grocery store and back.
The fact of the matter is that there's a little more to it than Turing equivalence. Sure, you could write a massively OO object exchange system in Assembly, or a language metaparser in Visual Basic, or just about anything in Befunge. They're all turing equivalent. For that matter, so is morse code to an interpreter with an abacus over tin cans and string.
That said, in the real world we need reasonable tools to facilitate development. I have neither the time nor the patience to reinvent each and every wheel in what I make. There's a question of skill: how many of us could remake some of these mechanisms as efficiently, rigorously, or bereft of side effects (hell, even of bugs) as they currently are?
Ahem, at least if you're not using VC. Scoping problems on for indices, indeed. If you don't know about it, google about it before flaming me, fucktards; it's a known bug with such a history that it's an option in VC.NET that actually comes shipped as default wrong. Borktastic.
So, look, there's more to it still. Sure, writing in assembly is as turing as writing in Scheme and Haskell. But, look, let's play with C++ for a minute. Because C++ has generic programming that works in one fashion for
The fact of the matter is that if turing equivalence mattered, we'd all still be bootstrapping our mainframes with paper clips. And assembly is dead as an application writing language for a damned good reason.
Now go back to writing VB and telling yourself that it's no different than C++. We understand.
- Fatty, King of Contention, Arrogantest Ever (tm)
Another problem I have with C++ is that even with all its power you have no way to get to the "left hand" variable of operations.
You can use a reference. C++ Gotchas, Dewhurst, Gotcha #5.
I think what C and C++ really lack is the option to turn on array range checking.
I wrote a range checked class in eight lines, but the Slashdot lameness filter won't let me post it. There're examples in Effective C++ (start with M18.)
Granted it's not part of the fundamental language, but it's not hard to implement, and with some creativity it can apply to nearly every situation that can't already be covered with enums.
The old joke is that the language always should have been called ++c, but that since features were tacked on rather than planned in, that postincrement is maybe the best expression of what happened.
Frankly, I'm rooting for "P". D, indeed. Like you guys don't know why there wasn't an "A".
> The problem being there is no way to tell how
> old the person who checks the email address is.
Why is this a problem? The reason you don't get pornographic snail mail is that you can't determine the age of the recipient safely. The reason you don't see playboy in vending machine s(in this country - yay italy!) is that you can't guarantee the age of the purchaser. That's the reason you don't see cigarettes and booze in vending machines, too.
Frankly, I don't give a rat's ass what a spammer can and cannot predict. If they do not know for certain that the email address may safely be targeted for their scum, their consumption of bandwidth that the unwilling recipient pays for, then oh fucking well, go get a god damned job.
> An email address is just an alias
Wrong. An email address *can* be an alias. However, I have a number of email addresses which go solely to me. If I were foolish enough to say to a spammer that such-and-such an address is safe and a legitimate endpoint for adult mail, then the responsibility would be mine to keep it so, and the spammer would be absolved of responsibility regarding age authentication. However, the problem isn't those spammers, the spammers that pretend to opt you in; the problem is the spammers that harvest your address, sell to it at random, and end up sending my six year old daughter offers for cock pills and nigerian bank accounts.
> The person who checks that box could be 8 or
> 80, there is no way to tell.
This is due to a flawed, predatory business model. As soon as their customers are willing, this will become a nonissue.
> Unless there is some way to tell how old the
> person who checks the mailbox is,
User verification. We've had it in use since ancient times.
> there is no way to hold people responsible for
> sending emails inappropriate for children to
> that mailbox.
Baloney. The person which puts age restricted material into a public vending machine is responsible. Why should the spammer not be?
> You can send porn to a physical mailbox
Not without a customer request, you cannot. Be sure to ask the attorney general about this one on your day in court.
> and the person who gets the mail may be a
> minor, but you can't be held responsible for
> that minor seeing "inappropriate" material.
You really should learn how the law works; there are in fact half a dozen cases in which precedents were set about this very issue, back in the 1960s. Not only can they be held for the minor seeing inappropriate material, but they should be.
The solution for physical mail is simple: plain brown wrapper with someone's name on it, and at the company's choice maybe identifying marks. They're not saying you can't mail the mailbox; they're saying you have to take measures to make sure that the delivery is secure. If someone opens mail not intended for them, then the delivery system has been hijacked, and it's not the company's fault anymore.
Just try to get a penthouse without said wrapper.
> They should e charged for sending spam (where
> applicable) but trying to prosecute them
> because they are sending mail to an emailbox
> where a child has access is very slippery,
> because there is no way to know who the box
> belongs to.
Yah, that's the thing about American law. If a company decides to do something when they can't tell if it will cause problems, but when there's a signficant risk, they are held indemnable.
Cluestick: law books are cheap. Get one or library one before commenting again.
> Does this mean that we should require all left-
... yes.
> handed people to start writing with their right
> hands
Well,
Are you gonna be one of those people that whines all the way through phalanx training?
I don't want the new AGB. An Afterburner looks just as good as the official frontlight (it's not a backlight, folks.) The battery pack can be bought for $15 as an accessory. The SP is too small for big hands, and has no headphone jack.
I wouldn't buy an original AGB at this point; modding isn't a particularly good answer for many, but this is slashdot, so why throw things away?
Why is this modded +3, Informative?
> I'm suprised Nintendo is waiting until September to release it in the 'states.
Go to Best Buy. Sure, it's gonna be until September that they'll be in stock, but the article is about how they came out 10 weeks ago. It goes on to talk about which retailers have them.
I mean, I can see talking about something that the article linked to without reading it, because you're lazy and want to sound clueful. But couldn't you at least read the slashdot article?
Buy one at Walmart
-1, Moron
I find this article curious, given that it's been less than two days since the article about all of those Motorola wearable smart devices.
I'm with the guy from the front of the message queue that said that the article is silly, based on that it argues that Bluetooth has failed by not addressing concerns that are counter to its design princip,les. Bluetooth doesn't work for WANs because it's a PAN connection - personal area network. It's intended to help you get rid of very small wires that connect chunks of distributed devices together - headphones to CD players are the common example.
My belief is that Bluetooth is still a bit too early. It's good that it's becoming ubiquitous now; still, if more PCs included it by default (I mean come on, guys, ethernet cards are really not that useful to most people; how many people run LANs in their home, or have a cable modem/dsl modem that isn't a PCI card or USB device?) it'd start to really take off. PDAs should drop IR. It's stupid.
Look, the real problem is that nobody really understands just how useful watches that can display broadcast data are, right now. There are three reasons:
Oone, it's not pervasive enough to make a useful advantage. Once stock tickers and email come across a watch conveniently, tha'tll begin to change.
Two, it's too rare (currently nonexistant, soon to be too expensive, later to be reasonable.) I mean, how long did it take Palm to break the $100 barrier? A parent can get a GameBoy for $70. If Palm got off of its ass while it still had money and funded some game developers, things would have been different. The early adopters aren't technophiles; there aren't enough of us to matter in the economic sense. They're businesspeople and kids - the people that want toys and don't have to worry about money.
Three, there's the Star Trek factor. Everyone on SlashDot, in my opinion, gets this ass backwards; we tend to forget that we're in the minority. Nobody else wants to look like they walked off of the set of Star Trek. Look at music videos. Look at fashion shows. Go to a high school football game, a rave, or just out in the sun somewhere. (Those of you who have friends that aren't sure where to find the sun should offer assistance; we all know at least one of them, and despite being transparent and having Gollum eyes, they're people too.) You will not find anything more complex than a Palm Pilot.
Oh, by the way, a hint to you designers out there: I was watching some B science fiction show on Sci Fi at 4 in the morning last night, and one of their props - a hologram projector, by the looks of it - was a palm pilot with a silver spray painted shell. This is bad. You still haven't made something that looks normal. Remove thumb from ass and try again until you get it right, please. I love my palm pilot, and I've owned more than one of them, starting with a Palm 1000, and you know what? I still think it looks silly. Also, you can't use it to play games. The buttons were laid out by someone with no hands, I'm quite certain.
Bluetooth isn't dead. It doesn't have its market yet. Look how well it's doing when we can't even come up with anything better than headphones to explain what it's for.
> The terrorists won!
That said, if:
> Also nobody from Priceline.
Then so did the consumers. You ever had to endure the tenth explanation of Priceline by someone which fundamentally doesn't understand it, all the way to LA?
> I thought this was interesting
Score: (5, Interesting)
These are not the droids you are looking for.
(Pity I posted tihs 8 days late, huh?)
> Anyone else find this to be a reasonable
> thumbrule?
Generally in the case of a programmer which knows one and not the other, yes. And to know a language isn't to be able to write it, manual in hand, but rather to have used it for four years to do things it wasn't meant to for a PHB that doesn't know dick.
(IE, to be my coworker. Grumble.)
If a programmer knows both, they'll use idioms from either in the other. What you're seeing are language tendencies being embodied in programmers which don't have alternatives, IMNSHO.
> Clever programmers use Lisp, Scheme and Haskell.
>
> Smart programmers use whatever language the
> market's hiring, and don't get caught up on
> language wars.
Clever programmers use something new every eight months. Employed programmers use whatever's being hired for. Smart programmers use whatever language suits the job best.
Language wars may be stupid, but language selection isn't. You translate an unknown natural language with Prolog. You build web services with PHP, perl, lisp, xslt. You build embedded applications in C++, C, or in extreme cases assembly.
You do not write embedded Scheme, ml for the Web, or Prolog to keep simple databases.
And besides, there is Only One Truth (tm) to language wars: Java Sucks.
"During National Brotherhood Week..." - Tom Lehrer